Business Process Models. Change Management

the long version

Driven by the need for a closer alignment of business and IT requirements, the role of business process models in the development of enterprise software systems has increased continuously. Similar to other software artifacts, process models are developed and refined in team environments by several stakeholders, resulting in different versions. These versions need to be merged in order to obtain an integrated process model. Existing solutions to this basic problem in the field of software configuration management are mainly limited to textual documents, e.g., source code. This monograph presents a generally applicable framework for process model change management, which provides easy-to-use comparison and merging capabilities for the integration of different process model versions. The framework supports popular modeling languages such as BPMN, BPEL, or UML Activity Diagrams. Differences between process models are represented in terms of intuitive, high-level change operations. Equipped with a sophisticated analysis of dependencies and a semantic-aware computation of conflicts between differences, the framework constitutes a comprehensive and practically usable solution for process model change management in the model-driven development of enterprise software systems.