From Requirements to Executable Processes: A Literature Study

Abstract

Service compositions are a major component to realize service-based applications (SBAs). The design of these service compositions follows mainly a process-modelling approach—an initial business process is refined until it can be executed on a workflow engine. Although this process-modelling approach proved to be useful, it largely disregards the knowledge gained in the requirements engineering discipline, e. g. in eliciting, documenting, managing and tracing requirements. Disregarding the requirements engineering phase may lead to undesired effects of the later service compositions such as lack of acceptance by the later users. To defuse this potentially critical issue we are interested in the interplay between requirements engineering and process modelling techniques. As a first step in this direction, we analyse the current literature in requirements engineering and process modelling in order to find overlaps where the techniques from both domains can be combined in useful ways. Our main finding is that scenario-based approaches from the requirements engineering discipline are a good basis for deriving executable processes. Depending whether the focus is on requirements engineering or on process design the integration of the techniques are slightly different.