Towards a method to generate GUI prototypes from BPMN

Abstract

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) provides organizations with a standard that facilitates further compression of the business process. BPMN focuses on the functional processes, leaving the development of interfaces to one side. Thereby, interface design usually depends on the subjective experience of the analyst. This article aims to propose a new method to generate user interfaces from BPMN models and Class Diagrams. The proposed method is based on the identification of different rules and makes use of stereotypes to extend BPMN notation. The rules have been extracted from seven existing projects on the Bizagi repository. Specifically, the proposal is based on the extraction of rules for generating user interfaces based on three widely used patterns: sequence pattern, exclusive decision pattern and synchronization pattern. As a result of our proposal, eleven new stereotypes have been added to BPMN notation. These stereotypes allow generating interfaces based on business process models. For a better understanding, the proposed stereotypes have been applied to an illustrative example. The results show that this work is a “step forward to” the automatic code generation from models.