Amelia Bădică, Carmen Radu, Costel Ionascu Department of Statistics and Business Informatics University of Craiova, Romania 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Project Overview  Project Methodology  Current Status  Conclusions 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Organizations – very complex and require carefully developed models of their underlying business processes.  Education – an information-centered industry.  DocSys project – interested in analysis and improvement of document workflows in the University of Craiova. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Provide a better understanding of the organization in order to support an increased spirit of stakeholder collaboration.  Improve the quality of processes by systematic detection of the sources and causes of poor quality.  Build a fully automated IT solution for the management of document workflows. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Capture and represent process models using (semi-)formal languages.  Formalize business process knowledge and its application for the analysis, verification of workflows. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Define a process design methodology.  Define an appropriate conceptual modeling framework of business processes.  Define a suitable declarative modeling language for capturing reusable process knowledge. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Case processes – deal with a single instance of a unit of work = case.  Case management processes – deal with the management of the flow of cases associated to a unit of work.  Case strategy processes – take a long term view of the organization with a focus on its case and case management processes. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 A lot ! ◦ Methodologies ◦ Conceptual frameworks ◦ Modeling languages  Our work is mainly influenced by: ◦ RIVA methodology and Role Activity Diagrams conceptual framework (Ould, 2005) ◦ FOL-based lightweight business process modeling (Chen-Burger & Robertson, 2005) 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Identify the essential and designed entities that represent the business of the organization  types of documents that are circulated in the university.  Decide what business entities represent units of work for the organization  set of case and case management processes.  Define the dynamic relationships between units of work  process architecture.  Refine the dynamics of each unit of work  detailed models of each unit of work + organizational roles. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Notation and example 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 RAD – a container of roles.  Role – groups together activities into units of responsibility. A Role is defined as a directed bipartite graph with arcs connecting state nodes with action nodes (activity nodes, case refinement nodes, and part refinement nodes)  RADNode – represents a node of the directed graph that defines a given Role.  State, Activity, CaseRefinement, PartRefinement, Interaction. They define each type of node of the directed graph that represents a role.

15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

metaclass(ClassName) ClassName is the name of a class (in fact a metaclass) from our conceptual framework. superclass(SuperClass, SubClass) SubClass is a subclass of SuperClass in our conceptual framework. class(MetaClass, Class) Class is a class that represents an instance of MetaClass. instance(Class, Instance) Instance is an instance of Class. Process models can be captured in our model as a set of first-order facts

 Focus on factual knowledge elicitation about UOWs addressing document circulation in the university. ◦ Inspect manually document samples ◦ Interview stakeholders for gathering information about the type, source and destination of documents  Document scope, i.e. internal or external  Generic document type, eg. request (application form), report, notification, agreement, decision, technical note, proposal, minutes,...  Document name  mission of the document.  Sample workflow instance (trace)  list of (role,activity)  Duration: 6 months 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

document( 4, internal, request, 'Studies Interruption Request', [('Faculty Student'(FacultyName),issue), ('Registry'(FacultyName),register), ('Dean(FacultyName),approve), ('Secretary'(FacultyName),execute), ('Archive'(FacultyName),archive) ] ). 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 75 facts: Excel  CSV  Prolog  Average sample workflow instance: 6  450 activities  65 roles 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Verification & Validation – a complex set of activities in the software development process that are responsible with checking:  if a software complies with its specification – Verification  if it meets the real requirements of its customers – Validation. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Multiple registration. ◦ A document must not be registered by more than one role belonging to the same organizational unit of the university.  Bottleneck. ◦ No role can be a bottleneck for document circulation workflows. A bottleneck role is a role that is responsible or is a decision point for an excessively high number of document circulation workflows. 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

problem('Multiple registration',DocId,DocName) :- document(DocId,_,_,DocName,SampleWorflow), member((Role1,register),SampleWorflow), Role1 \== Role2, partOf(Role1,OrganizationalUnit), partOf(Role2,OrganizationalUnit). 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015

 Early stage of DocSys project at UCV  Preliminary results: ◦ Definition of the project methodology ◦ Proposal of an initial version of a process modeling conceptual framework ◦ Experiment of elicitation of factual knowledge about sample workflow instances of document circulation.  Future work: ◦ refine the gathered knowledge, by acquiring additional information that will allow us to enhance our models in order to define an automated procedure for obtaining more detailed and accurate business process models ◦ expanding our conceptual framework using concepts from BSDM, allows the knowledge engineer to capture explicit knowledge about business entities and their dependencies ◦ mapping FOL model to other languages – BPMN and OWL 15th Workshop on Software Engineering Education, Bohinj, Slovenia, August 23-30, 2015