reBPMN: Recovering and reducing business processes

Abstract

Specification models recovered from existing software applications can support developers in comprehending and checking the applications during maintenance and evolution operations. Often, in fact, a huge amount of business knowledge is embedded in the application implementation while documentation is not available or not aligned with the actual software implementation. In order to (re)acquire and preserve the business knowledge, specifications recovery techniques are adopted. In this paper we present reBPMN, a tool that recovers business process models from execution traces of target applications. It recovers the process exposed by means of Web interfaces and it applies a multi-objective process reduction technique, which minimizes at the same time process complexity, non-conformances, and loss of business content. This allows us to obtain processes having high readability by decreasing their structural complexity, while preserving the completeness of the described business and domain-specific information. A case study shows the effectiveness of reBPMN in recovering readable and business-meaningful processes.