On the Use of Business Process Models to Discover System Requirements

A framework of generic categories of process activities is adopted as a framework of generic categories of system goals in order to guide the reasoning of system analysts and stakeholders for the discovery of system goals from business process models. The categories of process activities are organized in four essential aspects of the process concept: input, evolution, evaluation and decision and output. These categories are characterized by verbs which offer a semantic diversity that clarifies the field of reasoning and guides the discovery of goals. This article proposes an approach for obtaining system goals from business process models; the proposal is illustrated with a diverse and rich set of pertinent goals discovered for a system supporting a "booking a flight" process.