Towards using BPM Patterns in Requirements Elicitation

Abstract

In an increasingly changing environment, different organizations are trying to improve their agility and efficiency by improving their business processes; thus, business process management has been gaining momentum for the last decade. The first step in business process management is the modeling of business processes. Business Process Modeling (BPM), in itself, is very important because it captures business requirements, allows for better understanding of a business and its processes, facilitates communication between business analysts and IT people, and pinpoints deficiencies in processes. It also serves as a basis for automation of these processes. But business process modeling comes with its own challenges since it is a time-consuming, complicated, and error-prone task. As a result, producing a high quality, precise business process model is not easy. BPM patterns, which are general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in business process modeling, have been proposed to address these challenges. In this research, we conducted an exploratory study about requirements engineering practices in a large organization. This study identified key challenges in requirements engineering and showed how business process modeling is currently being conducted. Then, we created a survey of the different BPM pattern catalogs existing in the literature. Finally, we presented one of the BPM pattern catalogs in a clear format along with examples of each pattern. The ultimate objective is to allow business analysts to effectively use BPM patterns while creating precise BP models.