Business process models have proved to be useful for requirements elicitation. Since software development depends on the quality of the requirements specifications, generating high quality business process models is therefore critical. A key factor for achieving this is the expressiveness in terms of completeness and clarity of the modeling notation for the domain being modeled. The Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation model is frequently used for assessing the expressiveness of business process modeling notations. This article presents some propositions to adapt the BWW representation model to allow its application to the software requirements elicitation domain. These propositions are based on the analysis of the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) and the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK). The propositions are validated next by experts in business process modeling and software requirements elicitation. The results show that the BWW representation model requires to be specialized by including concepts specific to software req uirements elicitation.
ISO 14143-1 specifies that a functional size measurement (FSM) method must provide measurement procedures to quantify the functional user requirements (FURs) of software. Such quantitative information, functional size, is typically used, for instance, in software estimation. One of the international standards for FSM is the COSMIC FSM method — ISO 19761 — which was designed to be applied both to the business application (BA) software domain and to the real-time software domain. A recurrent problem in FSM is the availability and quality of the inputs required for measurement purposes; that is, well documented FURs. Business process (BP) models, as they are commonly used to gather requirements from the early stages of a project, could be a valuable source of information for FSM. In a previous article, the feasibility of such an approach for the BA domain was analyzed using the Qualigram BP modeling notation. This paper complements that work by: (1) analyzing the use of BPMN for FSM in the BA domain; (2) presenting notation-independent guidelines for the BA domain; and (3) analyzing the possibility of using BP models to perform FSM in the real-time domain. The measurement results obtained from BP models are compared with those of previous FSM case studies.
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