Discovering Business Models for Software Process Management - An Approach for Integrating Time and Resource Perspectives from Legacy Information Systems

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming the modern core to support business in all type of organizations and software business is not an exception. Software companies are often involved in important and complex collaborative projects carried out by many stakeholders. Each actor (customers, suppliers or government instances, among others) works with individual and shared processes. Everyone needs dynamic and evolving approaches for managing their software projects lifecycle. Nevertheless, many companies still use systems that are out of the scope of BPM for planning and control projects and managing enterprise content (Enterprise Content Management, ECM) as well as all kinds of resources (ERP). Somehow systems include scattered artifacts that are related to BPM perspectives: control and data flow, time, resource and case, for example. It is aimed to get interoperable BPM models from these classical Legacy Information Systems (LIS). Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) allows going from application code to higher-level of abstraction models. Particularly, there are standards and proposals for reverse engineering LIS. This paper illustrates LIS cases for software project planning and ECM, looking at time and resource perspectives. To conclude, we will propose a MDE-based approach for taking out business models in the context of software process management.