Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Organizations develop software applications to support their business processes (BPs). The development of high quality software is a very complex process that requires vast amounts of knowledge and skills both in software development itself and in the application domain. Despite the continuous evolution in the software engineering, software development process remains complex. Practice has shown that software industry continues to face many problems due to extra cost, extended delivery time and bad quality, the latter is costing US companies about $100 billion per year in lost productivity. To the extent that software applications are developed to support organizations' BPs, software models should somehow reflect the BPs that they support. Thanks to advances in BP modelling and model-driven engineering (MDE), we believe that we can use the correspondence between BPs and the software applications that support them to obtain software models. This is the premise behind the present research program that aims to bridge the gap between BPs and software applications using an MDE approach. The long-term objective of the proposed research program is to provide organizations with an MDE method that characterizes the transformations from BP models to software models expressed as services within the service-oriented architecture (SOA) style. More specifically, we are interested in exploring two transformations: Transformation 1. Transition from generic process models to precise organization-specific process models. Our approach to specify SOA models from models of the processes that they are supposed to support relies on the availability of detailed organization-specific BP models. However, modelling an organization-specific BP with enough detail requires an inordinate amount of effort of analysts and process designers. My doctoral and post-doctoral research focused on elaborating methods, techniques and tools to automatically obtain organization-specific BP models from generic BP models, and the results showed promise. In this research program, I will propose to address the fundamental issues raised by the approach. Transformation 2. Transition from precise business process models to SOA models. This transition aims at elaborating a new method, techniques and tools that characterizes the transformations from BP models to detailed SOA software models. The proposed research program will produce new scientific contributions in the software engineering field. From a practical perspective, it will elaborate a novel method supported by tools and a framework that help organizations to generate SOA-based software from generic BPs. By automating this process, we will reduce the software development complexity and enhance software quality which is an actual concern of the software industry. Finally, this research will contribute to the training of new HQP (PhD and MSc students).