Using Data-Centric Business Process Modeling for Discovering Requirements for Business Process Support Systems: Experience Report

Building a process model is a natural part of the requirements engineering (RE) when creating requirements for a computerized system/service to support a business process. When the process in question is workflowable (i.e. a process in which the order and the flow of tasks/operations/activities can be predefined), there are plenty of modeling techniques, notations and tools that can help in this undertaking. These techniques, however, are of little use for discovering requirements for support of non-workflowable processes in which the information artifacts created in the process (e. g. reports, lecture slides, budget documents) are of more importance than the flow of tasks/operations/activities. Other types of techniques, notations and tools are required in this case. This paper reports on a project of using a data-centric modeling approach supported by a computerized tool in RE. The goal of the project was to test whether the approach could be useful for the task of discovering requirements on a computerized system/service supporting the process, and which and how much of requirements could be captured using it. The process used in the test is a process of course preparation in the authors' own department. The paper reports on the environment in which the project has been conducted, results achieved, and lessons learned.