Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Assessing the effectiveness of sequence diagrams in the comprehension of functional requirements: results from a family of five experiments

Modeling is a fundamental activity within the requirements engineering process and concerns the construction of abstract descriptions of requirements that are amenable to interpretation and validation. The choice of a modeling technique is critical whenever it is necessary to discuss the interpretation and validation of requirements. This is particularly true in the case of functional requirements and stakeholders with divergent goals and different backgrounds and experience. This paper presents the results of a family of experiments conducted with students and professionals to investigate whether the comprehension of functional requirements is influenced by the use of dynamic models that are represented by means of the UML sequence diagrams. The family contains five experiments performed in different locations and with 112 participants of different abilities and levels of experience with UML. The results show that sequence diagrams improve the comprehension of the modeled functional requirements in the case of high ability and more experienced participants.The authors wish to thank all the participants in the experiments. This research was partially supported by the MULTIPLE project (with ref. TIN2009-13838).Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Gravino, .C.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Scaniello, .G.; Tortora, .G. (2013). Assessing the effectiveness of sequence diagrams in the comprehension of functional requirements: results from a family of five experiments. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 39(3):327-342. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2012.27S32734239

Test Case Optimization and Redundancy Reduction Using GA and Neural Networks

More than 50% of software development effort is spent in testing phase in a typical software development project. Test case design as well as execution consume a lot of time. Hence, automated generation of test cases is highly required. Here a novel testing methodology is being presented to test object-oriented software based on UML state chart diagrams. In this approach, function minimization technique is being applied and generate test cases automatically from UML state chart diagrams. Software testing forms an integral part of the software development life cycle. Since the objective of testing is to ensure the conformity of an application to its specification, a test “oracle” is needed to determine whether a given test case exposes a fault or not. An automated oracle to support the activities of human testers can reduce the actual cost of the testing process and the related maintenance costs. In this paper, a new concept is being presented using an UML state chart diagram and tables for the test case generation, artificial neural network as an optimization tool for reducing the redundancy in the test case generated using the genetic algorithm. A neural network is trained by the back-propagation algorithm on a set of test cases applied to the original version of the system