Variability Patterns for Analyzing Flexible Processes

In practice, flexible processes often do not follow a fixed sequence of steps. Instead, process participants can rely on their knowledge and can decide for additional steps, change the execution order or skip a task. If a requirements engineer discusses such a process together with the stakeholders, variability has to be taken into account. The challenge is to translate the stakeholders' explanations into a process model by asking the right questions. In order to cope with this problem, we propose the use of patterns. Patterns are a well-known way in systems engineering to describe solutions for frequently occurring problems. In this paper, we present the idea of business process variability patterns and give examples how they can be used in requirements and process analysis.