Assessing the Applicability of Use Case Maps for Business Process and Workflow Description

Use Case Maps (UCMs) have already been used to describe business processes and workflows at a high level of abstraction. The semantics of UCMs, however, require further clarification and enhancement. An initial assessment based on 27 workflow and communication patterns (a) highlighted some of the semantic variation points of UCMs, (b) introduced small extensions to the UCM language in order to more precisely define scenarios, high-level business processes, and workflows, and (c) compared UCMs with other business process and workflow languages. This short paper summarizes the continuation of the assessment with a larger set of workflow patterns recently made available. The assessment concludes that the UCM notation including the proposed extensions is a competitive language to describe high-level business processes and workflows, while providing additional benefits over the other languages.