An Impact Assessment and Dependency Management Framework for BPM

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) is a relatively new development paradigm that takes a high-level approach to coding by leveraging a graphical, “flow chart” aesthetic that allows users to assemble modular tasks into a larger process. The resulting diagrams effectively enshrine the organizations processes into an executable model that provides an objective and transparent view of the process and the activities contained within. In doing so, BPM models serve as both a system to guide employees through proper business procedures as well as documentation of the businesses processes. Similar to most other software development environments, BPM development platforms possess several features intended to address the needs of code versioning, dependency management and impact assessment. However, due to the unique way that development is done in BPM platforms, the more traditional functionality of these features sometimes renders them ineffective and ill suited to the task of BPM development. Changes to lower level reusable components in these BPM models can result in impacts to diverse processes across an organization that are difficult to predict and onerous to locate. There is much room for improvement in BPM development tools. This thesis proposes a new framework for dependency management and impact assessment to improve the usability, effectiveness and efficiency. The framework is composed of a Business Process Component Architecture, a Dependency Data Model and an Upgrade Algorithm which are all used to provide increased visibility over dependent processes and superior guidance during upgrade operations. Several example case scenarios are be used to evaluate our proposed framework. The cases represent progressive degrees of complexity to test the capabilities and robustness of the framework. Overall, the framework was able to appropriately handle the case examples used and showed promise in terms of providing practical effort, time and cost savings for BPM developers. The framework can also provide developers assistance in locating circular dependencies, but is subject to the same limitations as developers when attempting to upgrade these relationships.