Grupo Alarcos · Journal article · 2013

Fundaments of business process archeology

Ricardo Pérez del Castillo, Mario Piattini Velthuis, Ignacio García Rodríguez de Guzmán

Advances in Business Information Systems and Analytics · 2013

Archeologists investigate some scenarios by trying to understand what they are observing and how it all fits together. Archeologists have to be careful to preserve the artifacts they find and respect and understand the cultural forces that produced them. Similar to traditional archeology, Business Process Archeology is carried out similarly to traditional archeology, but engineers do not have to wait for ages so that they can comprehend unfathomable artifacts. This is due to the fact that code and business process models become legacy just about as soon as they are written or modeled. Thereby, Business Process Archeology attempts to provide answers to the following questions: What are we looking at? How does it fit in with the rest of the world? and What were they thinking? This introductory chapter shows Business Process Archeology as an emerging stage within software modernization processes, focusing on understanding and recovering specific knowledge from existing software assets. Business Process Archeology consists of analyzing different software artifacts by means of reverse engineering techniques and tools in order to obtain very abstract models that depict not only the legacy systems but also the company and/or the company operation supported by this system (e.g., business process models). This chapter introduces fundaments and the basis of Business Process Archeology with some allusions to the remaining chapters of this book.