Recovering Workflows from Multi Tiered E-commerce Systems

A workflow is a computerized specification of a business process. A workflow describes how tasks are executed and ordered following business policies. E-commerce systems implement the workflows of the daily operations of an organization. Organizations must continuously modify their e-commerce systems in order to accommodate workflow changes. However, e-commerce systems are often designed and developed without referring to the workflows. Modifying e-commerce systems is a time consuming and error prone task. In order to correctly perform this task, developers require an in-depth understanding of multi tiered e-commerce systems and the workflows that they implement. In this paper, we present an approach which automatically recovers workflows from three tier e-commerce systems. Given the starting UI page of a particular workflow, the approach traces the flow of control throughout the different tiers of the e-commerce system in order to recover that workflow. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on an open source e-commerce system.