Transforming multi-role activities in software processes into business processes

Abstract

Software processes usually include activities involving severalpeople playing different roles. SPEM provides primitives for defining allthe roles involved in each activity. Software process specification nota-tions are not executable and thus supporting tools cannot provide thisfunctionality. Therefore, even having a formal software process specifica-tion we cannot achieve all the potential benefits: people have difficultiesin following their responsibilities, resulting in a low productivity. Thebusiness process domain provides notations that can be executed on aBPMS. There have been attempts to transform SPEM specifications intoBPMN. However, there is no natural way to model multi-role tasks inBPMN, and therefore none of these proposals has solved this issue. Inthis paper we discuss two promising alternatives for modeling multi-role software activities in BPMN: defining compound roles and modelingmulti-role tasks as independent processes. We provide an XSLT trans-formation for automatically generating each of these solutions from asoftware process specification. We use a real world running example toillustrate the approach.