A semi-automated approach for generating natural language requirements documents based on business process models

Abstract

Context: The analysis of requirements for business-related software systems is often supported by using business process models. However, the final requirements are typically still specified in natural language.This means that the knowledge captured in process models must be consistently transferred to the specified requirements. Possible inconsistencies between process models and requirements represent a serious threat for the successful development of the software system and may require the repetition of process analysis activities.Objective: The objective of this paper is to address the problem of inconsistency between process models and natural language requirements in the context of software development. Method:We define a semi-automated approach that consists of a process model-based procedure for capturing execution-related data in requirements models and an algorithm that takes these models as input for generating natural language requirements. We evaluated our approach in the context of a multiple case study with three organizations and a total of 13 software development projects.Results: We found that our approach can successfully generate well-readable requirements, which do not only positively contribute to consistency, but also to the completeness and maintainability of requirements.The practical use of our approach to identify a suitable subcontractor on the market in 11 of the 13 projects further highlights the practical value of our approach. Conclusion:Our approach provides a structured way to obtain high-quality requirements documents from process models and to maintain textual and visual representations of requirements in a consistent way.

Narration as a Technique to Improve Process Model Comprehension: Tell Me What I Cannot See

“…Textual descriptions that accompany business process models mainly serve two purposes. The first purpose relates to improving the understandability of the process model, since some stakeholders may have difficulties in comprehending -they may simply prefer to have textual explanations of the model at their disposal as well [26]. For this purpose, a process element such as an activity is described to explain its position within the process flow, e.g., after which activity and under what conditions it is executed, the responsible roles, its relations with other activities such as inputs or outputs [16].…”

BePT

“…Other Translators. Other "to-text" works that take BPMN [25], EPC [1], UML [27], image [40] or video [23] as inputs are difficult to apply into the process-related scenarios or are not for translation. Hence, we aim to design a novel process translator.…”

“…However, those models are difficult to reuse since they lack necessary NL guidelines or instructions to explain the steps, jump conditions and related resources [9,19,20,32]. For example, the repository offered with myExperiment currently contains more than 3918 process models from various disciplines including bioinformatics, astrophysics, earth sciences and particle physics [35], but only 1293 out of them have corresponding NL documents 1 , which shows the gap between the shared models and their NL descriptions. This real-world scenario illustrates that the cloud platforms do not have effective means to address this translation problem [32,42], i.e., automatically translating the semantics of process models into NL, thus making it challenging for users to reuse the shared models.…”

A Reflection on the Interrelations Between Business Process Management and Requirements Engineering with an Agility Perspective

“…Still, many SE practices are implemented during the development of a BPMS [28]. For example, process analysis is seen as an essential RE activity [29]. Table 1 presents the common SE activities in the first column [30], and provides a summary of similarities and differences of these activities for SE and the software part of BPM (i.e.…”