Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Approach: How to improve traceability between BPMN process model and UML component model

Workflow can be modeled with a Business Process Diagram or an Acivity Diagram and can be transformed manually or otherwise using underlying matamodel. However, the challenge lies in finding convergence of object-oriented approach offered by UML and process-centric approach taken by BPMN. To put this in context, it should be noted that UML methods asks you to find the objects first using the static structure diagrams and only then build dynamic behaviour diagram to model object interaction. In an attempt to satisfy the stated need, we can model our 'draft' activity model based upon Business Process Diagram as specified by BPMN at the 'first attempt' and 'later' the 'technical team' can refine and refactor the activity diagram so created in few iterations between static diagrams (class diagram etc.) and activity diagram to model the dynamic behaviour, which can improve the traceability.

For a detailed study of the subject one may be interested to study "Process Modeling Notations and Workflow Patterns" here.

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