X International conference�“Information Technology and Implementation” (IT&I-2023)�Kyiv, Ukraine

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TOWARDS SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR MAINTAINABILITY EVALUATION OF BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS USING FUZZY LOGIC

Andrii Kopp and Dmytro Orlovskyi

National Technical University “Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute”

Dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the Faculty of Information Technology

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Agenda and Research Questions

1. Motivation
2. Business Process Modeling
3. Business Process Model Maintainability Evaluation
4. Software Requirements Elicitation
5. Software Design and Development
6. Experimental Results

This study should answer the following research questions:

• How to assess the maintainability of a business process model using software-like metrics?
• How to improve and automate the evaluation of business process model maintainability?

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Motivation

• The quality of business process models is vital for the successful implementation of BPM projects, or at least for the collection of requirements during the development or modernization of enterprise information systems.
• Maintainability is one of the quality attributes of particular interest.
• In a dynamic environment, maintainability plays a key role in obtaining a business process model that can be easily improved, modified, and adapted to changes within the organization and in the external environment.
• In addition, avoiding mistakes at the previous stages (business process design phase) allows companies to avoid spending money and time on correcting the workflow at the implementation and execution stages of the business process.

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This study aims to improve the maintainability of business process models by using complexity metrics similar to software metrics.

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Business Process Modeling

There are numerous studies in the field of business process model quality:

• SEQUAL Framework;
• The Guidelines of Modeling (GoM);
• Quality Framework for conceptual modeling;
• Seven Process Modeling Guidelines (7PMG);
• Business process model quality metrics etc.

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BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) business process diagrams describe workflows in terms of events and activities linked through control flows, which indicate sequences in the process.

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Business process modeling aims to represent organizational activities so that current operations can be analyzed and improved.

Simple payment process model

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Process Model Maintainability Evaluation

It is proposed to evaluate business process models based on the CFC (Control-Flow Complexity) metric, which can be used as a metric of maintainability and quality:

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where:

is the gateway complexity metric of the XOR-Split type;

is the gateway complexity metric of the OR-Split type;

is the gateway complexity metric of the AND-Split type.

The parameters of the proposed membership functions were determined based on the thresholds of the CFC metric.

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The maximum value of the membership functions allows to evaluate the maintainability level of the business process model:

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Software Requirements Elicitation

FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS

1. Work with author accounts so that they can enter the dashboard with the results.
2. Check BPMN models to get a maintainability assessment and save them to the database.
3. Comment evaluated models to recommend possible actions to improve their quality.
4. Log in to the dashboard to access the results of the BPMN model check.
5. Receive the evaluation results and the reviewer’s comments to make corrections and improve the quality of the BPMN model.

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NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS

1. The software must be a cross-platform application.
2. The software should work and look the same in different web browsers.
3. The software should work with business process models presented in the BPMN 2.0 format.
4. The language of the software user interface must be English.
5. Passwords to software user accounts must be stored in encrypted form.
6. The software interface should not be overloaded, providing the user with up to 7 controls at the same time.

Software development stack

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Software Design and Development

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Demonstrated key components of the software tool, their purpose and allocation using the UML deployment diagram

The interaction between the software tool components is demonstrated using the UML sequence diagram

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Experimental Results

We analyzed the maintainability of 3729 BPMN models:

• 8.45% - low;
• 60.58% - moderate;
• 30.97% - high.

Main page of the developed software tool

Average complexity (CFC = 5) and modifiability

High complexity (CFC = 10) and low modifiability

• Avg. CFC = 5.03;
• Min. CFC = 0.00;
• Max. CFC = 24.

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Conclusions and Future Work

The following results were obtained in this study:

• the business process modeling domain and the existing metrics of business process models are reviewed – the CFC metric is chosen to build the fuzzy logic-based approach for BPMN analysis;
• the novel approach to the control-flow complexity measurement of business process models based on fuzzy logic is proposed – it resembles human reasoning to make the analysis results more understandable by BPMN model designers;
• the architecture of the software tool for assessing the maintainability of business process models based on the proposed approach is proposed – it assumes the idea of treating BPMN 2.0 models in the same way as other software engineering assets (i.e., source code files, configuration files, etc.) using the version-control system, this study assumes the use of Git;
• the software tool is developed using the Python programming language, the Flask and React web frameworks, the Bootstrap framework for building web interfaces, as well as the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript web development tools – using the proposed technology stack allows to rapidly build an initial prototype and perform the experiments;
• the solution of the business process model maintainability evaluation problem is demonstrated – the large collection of BPMN models from the Camunda GitHub repository is evaluated;
• the results are analyzed and discussed based on the CFC metric values obtained for the test set of BPMN 2.0 models – considering both split and join gateways allows to obtain a clearer picture regarding the complexity and maintainability of business process models.

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Future work in this field includes elaboration of the proposed software solution and its application to the relevant cases of BPMN models in different domains. Also, it is planned to improve the proposed approach by introducing the elements of automatic business process model correction depending on the desired level of its complexity and maintainability.

Information Technology and Implementation, November 20, 2023, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine

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Thank You for Your Attention!

Questions?