Eliciting Goals for Business Process

Models with Non-Functional Requirements

CataloguesEvellin C. S. Cardoso, João

Paulo A. Almeida, Giancarlo Guizzardi and

Renata S. S. Guizzardi(ecardoso@inf.ufes.br ) (jpalmeida@ieee.org ) (guizzardi@acm.org ) (rguizzardi@inf.ufes.br )

http://nemo.inf.ufes.brComputer Science Department

Federal University of Espírito Santo

Outline• Introduction;• Motivation;• Objectives;• Goal Elicitation in a Healthcare Institution;

– Preliminary Goal Elicitation Method;– Results of Preliminary Goal Elicitation Method;– Goal Elicitation with Catalogues;– Results of Goal Elicitation with Catalogues;

• Conclusions;• Future Work.

Introduction

• Competitiveness drives organizations to promote change to improve the quality of the services and products they offer;

• Understanding an organizational setting to promote these changes often requires a number of perspectives;

Motivation

• Goal-oriented business process modelling provides a dimension of intentionality to the business processes;

• The adoption of goal oriented approaches enables the organization to promote changes in the environment which are synchronized with the organizational strategy;

• However, goal elicitation from the organization domain is not an easy task.

Objectives

• The purpose of this paper is to report a field work in which we addressed the problem of identifying goals. We aim at contributing in the area of goal elicitation with a systematic way to identify goals in a given organizational setting;

• This field work took place in the Rheumatology Department of a hospital in Brazil;

• We suggest using Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) catalogues in order to tackle the difficulty in identifying business goals.

Goal Elicitation in a Healthcare Institution

Preliminary Goal Elicitation Method

• First Stage: assessment of available documentation about the organizational processes;

• Second Stage: observation of the daily routine of the organization;

• Third stage: interviews with the organizational actors during business process execution to reveal the goals;

• Fourth stage: dedicated interviews with the business process actors and department manager (dedicated interviews = interviewees devoted all attention to the elicitation process as opposed to being fully involved with activity execution).

Fig. 1. Goal model resulted from the preliminary goal elicitation activities

Results of Preliminary Goal Elicitation Method

Goal Elicitation with Catalogues

• Previous stages provided insights about new concerns;

• Insights guided us to suggest which NFR types could be extracted from NFR catalogues and adapted to the organizational context.

• Formulation of additional goals for the business process, initially without participation of the stakeholders.

• To refine the NFRs we had to consider the meaning of the NFRs’ refinement in the context of the domain under consideration.

Results of Goal Elicitation with Catalogues

Results of Goal Elicitation with Catalogues (continuation)

Results of Goal Elicitation with Catalogues

Fig. 2 Portion of the goal model obtained in goal elicitation activities with catalogues

Results of Goal Elicitation with Catalogues (continuation)

Results of Goal Elicitation with Catalogues

Fig. 3 Portion of goal model obtained in goal elicitation activities with catalogues (2)

Conclusions (1)• With respect to the translation of NFR types to goals

– The translation is highly domain-dependent;– An NFR type can be represented either as a soft or hard goal;– Different NFR types can be mapped to the same goal in the

organization;• With respect to the additional goals elicited with catalogues

– Identification of goals related with quality attributes (qualitative specification of hardgoal or business process);

– Identification of more abstract goals (goals previously modelled are actually goals for implementing mechanisms for the attainment of more abstract goals);

– Identification of goals of exceptional situations;– Identification of goals related with organizational characteristics;

Conclusions (2)

• With respect to the technique– Seems highly dependent on the experience of analysts in

conducting the elicitation effort (broad knowledge about the domain);

– NFR type catalogues can be seen as design patterns in goal modelling.

Future Work

• Investigation in NFR type catalogues for business process in a particular business domain may prove to reduce the dependency on analyst experience and improve goal elicitation in general;

• Investigation of suitable representation and semantics to relate goal models and business process models (especially in the presence of softgoals);

• Investigation of the impacts of additional goals elicited through the use of NFR catalogues in business process structures as well in the systematic redesign of business processes.

Questions?

About NEMOhttp://nemo.inf.ufes.brOntology and Conceptual Modeling Research GroupComputer Science DepartmentFederal University of Espírito SantoAv. Fernando Ferrari, s/n29060-970 Vitória, ES, Brazil