INGENIO – Good Software Engineering Practices for Software Processes Improvement

One of the main factors of the evolution of organizations are the new commercial conditions which joint with their need to respond to competitive pressure forces them to continuously improve the quality of their products and the efficiency of their services, considering not only the environment (providers, competitors, customers, etc.), but also their information systems. So, it has been observed a growing interest of organizations to analyze and manage their business processes which has turned the Business Process Management (BPM) into a very significant field of interest for them.

The INGENIO Project, jointly by its coordinated subproject AUTOFLEX-PN, aims to tackle the business process improvement in an integrated way by providing diverse solutions both methodological and technical ones. In relation to the methodological aspect, the aim is to provide organizations with the necessary means to effectively define their processes by promoting their evolution faced with changing environments and their flexibility in execution time. Additionally, organizations will be provided with the necessary mechanisms and methods to carry out the measurement of their processes and related artefacts in an effective and consistent way. From the technological perspective, the objective is to provide the necessary means to automate the organizational activities and the communication between automated information systems, for which the approach MDE (Model Driven Engineering) will be applied and the paradigm SOC (Service Oriented Computing) will be adopted. These proposals will be based on the application in the business field of Software Engineering techniques whose practical usefulness has been demonstrated in practice. With all these aspects in mind, the objectives of the current project can be grouped into the management of the following key aspects for process improvement:

• Business Process Modeling. Business process modeling proposals will be empirically evaluated (such as BPMN, YAWL, UML 2, etc..) with the aim to choose the most suitable language in relation to the maintainability of the process models obtained. Mechanisms of product lines variability and their application to business processes lines will be analysed and a technique will be developed to represent the variability in business process lines by enhancing the formerly selected business process modelling language. The necessary support will be provided to manage the flexibility in the execution of business processes. The proposals will be empirically validated by means of experiments and case studies.
• Business Process Measurement, by means of the definition and empirical validation of metrics related to the business process models and their execution. With this objective in mind, families of experiments will be planned and carried out. Methods for the definition of useful indicators in the field of business processes according to the kind of organization, available resources and maturity in their processes will be developed.
• Automation of Business Processes based on MDE and SOC. A framework which facilitates the automation of the activities in the business process and the communication between applications will be developed, considering the diversity of automation options (new systems, network services, legacy systems use, ..). From the business conceptual models, the framework must obtain logical models which are necessary to the later execution of the processes by following the MDE approach. The framework will be based on a methodology of application development according to the SOC (Service-oriented Computing) approach. This methodology will be developed and must provide the necessary means for the communication and orchestration of all the services and application through the definition of communication interfaces based on standards.

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