Grupo Alarcos · Conference paper · 2013
Challenges of Business Process Model Improvement after Reverse Engineering
María de la Sierra Fernández Ropero, Mario Piattini Velthuis
Business process models have become one of the most important assets for companies since an appropriate business process management helps companies to quickly adapt their processes to changes while their competitiveness is maintained or even improved. As a consequence, companies are currently demanding mechanisms to ensure business processes with an appropriate quality degree. These business process models can be obtained through reverse engineering from existing information systems. Unfortunately, reversed models usually have a lower quality degree and may not reflect the actual business processes exactly. This paper describes all detected challenges that should be addressed for improving quality of business processes, specially retrieved by reverse engineering (e.g., missing or non-relevant elements, fine-grained elements, etc.). This work also suggests an approach to improve business process models along three phases: repairing, refactoring and semantic improvement. In addition, some preliminary results about the refactoring stage are provided using real-life retrieved business process models.