KS
I would like to propose an approach for incorporating a set of quality requirements into BPMN. The aim of this proposal is to support quality requirements at business process level to help the modeler choose appropriate services for business processes and aid the specification of SLAs. In addition the proposal includes an analytical based evaluation model, for evaluating overall business process quality requirements.
In my research I have covered the theory behind that and designed an approach for that. I wonder I there is a possibility to cooperate with ARIS community or developer to develop my proposal in ARIS Express modelling tool?
I am glad that my proposal fined an interest from you. I would be very happy to share and discuss all the detail about my approach and work in collaboration with ARIS developer to build up my approach.
The proposal aims to capture and represent quality requirements at the business process modelling stage. Non-functional requirements or Quality requirements cover wide range of attributes and details. Hence, to maintain the same abstraction level consistent with business process models created by BPMN we propose focusing on a core set of quality requirements closely related to customers’ preferences and commonly addressed in SLAs, which are time, cost, and reliability. The proposal is flexible to allow business analysts to configure other quality requirements. Following to BPMN v2.0 specifications the proposed extension is applied to activity element and inherently applied to all tasks available in BPMN 2 as shown in as shown in Fig. 1.
Figure 1. Linking Activity element with quality metamodel
The graphical representation of the extended notations should be simple, economic, consistent, non-ambiguous scalable, and visually intuitive. A table format is chosen to represent quality requirements and related values as shown in Fig.2. Fig. 2 a) represents the collapsed view of the activity with quality requirements. This gives a simple and aesthetic view of quality representation in BPMN. Fig.2 b) represents the detailed values of the quality requirements in a table to simplify reading the notations.
Time (T), Cost(C), Reliability (R)
Figure 2. Quality requirement representation
The proposal includes an evaluation model to quantify the quality requirements for the overall business process. The evaluation model and related formulae need to be matched with business process structural models as different workflow structures exist in a business process model. Therefore, analytical based quality requirement evaluation model for evaluating the qualities of an end-to-end business process is used to evaluate the basic workflow structures which are sequence, parallel, conditional and loop flow.
Hope that give clear idea, I would be delightful if we can cooperate in developing the tool and having this proposal life.
You can email me on saeedik@cs.man.ac.uk for further discussion.
Sorry for coming back so late, but I am wondering if you really need a new icon/addition to show this information in ARIS today (but it is a nice idea, though).
It is possible to define the information you want to capture in attributes (and organize them in attribute groups for easier maintenance) and show/hide them by using the template functionality. By doing this you can also specify icons for your attributes as it is done for example in the Balanced Scorecard Solution (showing different icons based on the attribute value selection, e.g. from a dropdown list or boolean attribute).
Obviously you can create a report based on this information -and the other information in your database- either with the WYSIWYG editor or, for more complex reports, the script editor using JavaScript.
