Analyzing the ripple effects of change in business process models

Change management is a critical task to control the side effects of a modification during the business process evolution. The evolution of business processes is an essential activity for the companies to better fulfill the requirements of their customers and different stakeholders. In this respect, the enterprises should adopt an effective mechanism in order to achieve the flexible business process models. It is important to identify and highlight the ripple effects of a change for minimizing their impact on other parts or entities of the system and associated services. This paper proposes a dependency-centric approach for change impact analysis. We attempt to demonstrate the change impact propagation in business process models by detecting and analyzing the interdependencies among all parts of business processes along with associated services. It can support the maintenance and evolution of business process models. The major objective is to help the modelers and business experts to assess the associated risk of intended changes and estimate the effort required for their accomplishments.