Alignment of Business Process and Information System Models Through Explicit Traceability

In the software development lifecycle, business process models (BPMs) turn out to play an ever more pivotal role in the development and continued management of information systems (ISs). However, BPMs and IS models (ISMs) are traditionally expressed separately. This separation causes drift between them, impedes their interoperability, and thus builds up misaligned models. Traceability in software development proves its ability to link together related artifacts from different sources within a project (for examples, business modelling, requirements, design models), improves project outcomes by assisting designers and other stakeholders with common tasks such as impact analysis, etc. In this paper, we propose an improvement and an extension of an existing requirement traceability method in order to tackle the traceability between design, requirement and BPMs. In fact, the extension consists in adding the UML class diagram concepts structured according to the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern to be traced with BPMN and UML use cases models in a single unified model. This method is based on the integration mechanism, acts at the model and the meta-model levels, and can be used to develop a new IS and/or to examine the misalignment of the existing ISMs and the BPMs after BPM/ISM evolution.