Towards Visualisation and Analysis of Runtime Variability in Execution Time of Business Information Systems based on Product Lines

Abstract

There is a set of techniques that build Business Information Systems (BIS) deploying business processes of the company directly on a process engine. Business processes of companies are continuously changing in order to adapt to changes in the environment. This kind of variability appears at runtime, when a business subprocess is enabled or disabled. To the best of our knowledge, there exists only one approach able to represent properly runtime variability of BIS using Software Product Lines (SPL), namely, Product Evolution Model (PEM). This approach manages the variability by means of a SPL where each product represents a possible evolution of the system. However, although this approach is quite valuable, it does not provide process engineers with the proper support for improving the processes by visualising and analysing execution-time (non-design) properties taking advantage of the benefits provided by the use of SPL. In this paper, we present our first steps towards solving this problem. The contribution of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, we provide a visualisation dashboard for execution-traces based on the use of UML 2.0 timing diagrams, that uses the PEM approach; on the other hand, we provide a conceptual framework that shows a roadmap of the future research needed for analysing execution-time properties of this kind of systems. Thus, due the use of SPL, our approach opens the possibility for evaluating specific conditions and properties of a business process that current approaches do not cover.