A Quality Assurance Framework for Business Process Management

Abstract

A business process is a defined collection of linked structured tasks, activities, and decisions performed together to produce a desired set of results in order to achieve business goals on behalf of the organization. Companies are increasingly moving their business processes online using Business Process Management (BPM) tools and technologies. With BPM, online business processes are defined by an explicit business process model that flexibly combines and orchestrates forms delivered through a web browser to integrate tasks performed by people, and web services accessible through Internet protocols to integrate tasks performed by software. Often the approach to quality assurance for online business processes is similar to what would be done with any other web application. This is insufficient since it only provides rudimentary verification of single user behavior whereas the orchestration of tasks across many users and software systems can be quite complex. As well, a simple web application testing approach does not leverage the defined model for a business process to ensure consistency, completeness and enable automation. Nor will such an approach validate that a business process is contributing towards the achievement of business goals. A more systematic approach is required. This thesis proposes a quality assurance framework to provide a repeatable, systematic, cost-efficient approach to quality assurance for BPM. A prototype framework was implemented and evaluated using two case studies, including one case study that was developed in collaboration with a local hospital to support a business process for cancer care assessment.