Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Blockchain for Business Process Enactment: A Taxonomy and Systematic Literature Review

Blockchain has been proposed to facilitate the enactment of interorganisational business processes. For such processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of rules and the integrity of execution traces - without the need for a centralised trusted party. However, the enactment of interorganisational processes pose manifold challenges. In this work, we ask what answers the research field offers in response to those challenges. To do so, we conduct a systematic literature review (SLR). As our guiding question, we investigate the guarantees and capabilities of blockchain-based enactment approaches. Based on resulting empirical evidence, we develop a taxonomy for blockchain-based enactment. We find that a wide range of approaches support traceability and correctness; however, research focusing on flexibility and scalability remains nascent. For all challenges, we point towards future research opportunities.Comment: Preprint, Accepted at BPM 2022, Blockchain Foru

Approximate Compliance Checking for Annotated Process Models

We describe a method for validating whether the states reached by a process are compliant with a set of constraints. This serves to (i) check the compliance of a new or altered process against the constraints base, and (ii) check the whole process repository against a changed constraints base, e.g., when new regulations come into being. For these purposes we formalize a particular class of compliance rules as well as annotated process models, the latter by combining a notion from the workflow literature with a notion from the AI actions and change literature. The compliance rules in turn pose restrictions on the desirable states. Each rule takes the form of a clausal constraint, i.e., a disjunction of literals. If for a given state there is a grounded clause none of whose literals are true, then the constraint is violated and indicates non-compliance. Checking whether a process is compliant with the rules involves enumerating all reachable states and is in general a hard search problem. Since long waiting times during process modelling are undesirable, it is important to explore restricted classes and approximate methods. We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, for a particular class of processes, computes the sets of literals that are necessarily true at particular points during process execution. Based on this information, we devise two approximate compliance checking methods. One of these is sound but not complete (it guarantees to find only non-compliance instances, but not to find all non-compliance instances); the other method is complete but not sound. We sketch how one can trace the state evolution back to the process activities which caused the (potential) non-compliance, and hence provide the user with some error diagnosis