Considering quality factors for business processes during requirement engineering

Business process (BP) modelling is considered as an important part of Requirement Engineering in describing the context within which requirements are articulated, specified and analysed. The intertwining of business and information systems imposes considerable stresses on requirements engineers to consider quality factors that need to be present in both business processes and the software that supports these processes. We argue that the quality of BPs has to be taken into account at the requirement engineering stage, where quality requirements are to be defined, along with the corresponding quality factors and the metrics that will be used to evaluate them. We consider that a BP is represented by a model and that quality requirements are to be examined within the BP model. In this work, our goal is to provide a support for evaluating the quality of a BP through the corresponding model. We present a quality framework for BPs and a quality-oriented BP metamodel. This metamodel is enriched with quality-related attributes that will be used to evaluate the quality factors. To demonstrate the utility of the proposed quality framework we will use a BP model relating to the management of spectators at an Olympics venue, we will show the instantiation of our metamodel in this context along with evaluation results for some quality factors.