Use cases to process specifications in business process modeling notation

Abstract

Use cases are a key technique to elicit software requirements from the point of view of the user of a system. Their prevalence is noticeable ever since the onset of agile programming techniques. Within SOA projects however, business process models are used for capability analysis and gap detection. Business process models present a global view of the system and hence are more suited for gap detection. Therefore, in practice both these forms of requirements continue to be useful and coexist. Often in big software projects and in distributed development environment such coexisting requirement specifications can grow out of synch. We present here a technique to semi-automatically transform use cases into business processes and to create mapping between them. By preserving the mapping between these forms one can enforce consistency between the two forms of requirements. © 2010 IEEE.