Detecting Functional Requirements Inconsistencies within Multi-teams Projects Framed into a Model-based Web Methodology

One of the most essential processes within the software project life cycle is the REP (Requirements Engineering Process) because it allows specifying the software product requirements. This specification should be as consistent as possible because it allows estimating in a suitable manner the effort required to obtain the final product. REP is complex in itself, but this complexity is greatly increased in big, distributed and heterogeneous projects with multiple analyst teams and high integration between functional modules. This paper presents an approach for the systematic conciliation of functional requirements in big projects dealing with a web model-based approach and how this approach may be implemented in the context of the NDT (Navigational Development Techniques): a web methodology. This paper also describes the empirical evaluation in the CALIPSOneo project by analyzing the improvements obtained with our approach.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

DETECTING ROLE INCONSISTENCIES IN PROCESS MODELS

Business process models capture crucial information about business operations. To overcome the challenge of maintaining process definitions in large process repositories, researchers have suggested methods to discover errors in the functional and the behavioral perspectives of process models. However, there is a gap in the literature on the detection of problems on the organizational perspective of process models, which is critical to manage the resources and the responsibilities within organizations. In this paper, we introduce an approach to automatically detect inconsistencies between activities and roles in process models. Our approach implements natural language processing techniques and enterprise semantics to identify ambiguous, redundant, and missing roles in textual descriptions. We applied our approach on the process model repository of a major telecommunication company. A quantitative evaluation of our approach with 282 real-life activities displayed that this approach can accurately discover role inconsistencies. Practitioners can achieve significant quality improvements in their process model repositories by applying the approach on process models complemented with textual descriptions

Improving automation standards via semantic modelling: Application to ISA88

Standardization is essential for automation. Extensibility, scalability, and reusability are important features for automation software that rely in the efficient modelling of the addressed systems. The work presented here is from the ongoing development of a methodology for semi-automatic ontology construction methodology from technical documents. The main aim of this work is to systematically check the consistency of technical documents and support the improvement of technical document consistency. The formalization of conceptual models and the subsequent writing of technical standards are simultaneously analyzed, and guidelines proposed for application to future technical standards. Three paradigms are discussed for the development of domain ontologies from technical documents, starting from the current state of the art, continuing with the intermediate method presented and used in this paper, and ending with the suggested paradigm for the future. The ISA88 Standard is taken as a representative case study. Linguistic techniques from the semi-automatic ontology construction methodology is applied to the ISA88 Standard and different modelling and standardization aspects that are worth sharing with the automation community is addressed. This study discusses different paradigms for developing and sharing conceptual models for the subsequent development of automation software, along with presenting the systematic consistency checking methodPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The alignment of formal, structured and unstructured process descriptions

Nowadays organizations are experimenting a drift on the way processes are managed. On the one hand, formal notations like Petri nets or Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) enable the unambiguous reasoning and automation of designed processes. This way of eliciting processes by manual design, which stemmed decades ago, will still be an important actor in the future. On the other hand, regulations require organizations to store their process executions in structured representations, so that they are known and can be analyzed. Finally, due to the different nature of stakeholders within an organization (ranging from the most technical members, e.g., developers, to less technical), textual descriptions of processes are also maintained to enable that everyone in the organization understands their processes. In this paper I will describe techniques for facilitating the interconnection between these three process representations. This requires interdisciplinary research to connect several fields: business process management, formal methods, natural language processing and process mining.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Identifying functional requirements inconsistencies in multiteam projects framed into a model-based methodology

REP (Requirements Engineering Process) is one of the most essential processes within the software project life cycle because it allows describing software product requirements. This specification should be as consistent as possible to enable estimating in a suitable manner the effort required to obtain the final product. REP is complex in itself, but this complexity is greatly increased in big, distributed and heterogeneous projects with multiple analyst teams and high integration among functional modules. This paper presents an approach for the systematic conciliation of functional requirements in big projects dealing with a model based approach. It also explains how this approach may be implemented in the context of NDT (Navigational Development Techniques) methodology and finally, it describes a preliminary evaluation of our proposal in CALIPSOneo project by analyzing the improvements obtained with our approach.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-R (POLOLAS)Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Challenges and opportunities of applying natural language processing in business process management

The Business Process Management (BPM) field focuses in the coordination of labor so that organizational processes are smoothly executed in a way that products and services are properly delivered. At the same time, NLP has reached a maturity level that enables its widespread application in many contexts, thanks to publicly available frameworks. In this position paper, we show how NLP has potential in raising the benefits of BPM practices at different levels. Instead of being exhaustive, we show selected key challenges were a successful application of NLP techniques would facilitate the automation of particular tasks that nowadays require a significant effort to accomplish. Finally, we report on applications that consider both the process perspective and its enhancement through NLP.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version