Towards a Uniform Semantic Representation of Business Processes, UML Artefacts and Software Assets

Abstract

The development of a complex software system involves many actors, whose skills and knowledge are very heterogeneous. The requirements representation made using the Business Process notations is far more understandable than the classic UML representation, at least for Business experts, as it allows to investigate the system from other points of view which are not merely connected the development of the software itself. However, it is not possible to completely disregard UML representations, as they catch software design information which would be lost otherwise. In order to use both representations as basic tools through the whole software development life cycle, a key point is to ensure that they can be easily combined together to facilitate the development of the system software assets. In this paper we address this interoperability scope and provide a unified semantic representation, capable of covering every aspect of software development life cycle and of bonding the different Business and Software development points of view, from the requirements definition to the actual implementation of the source code, including the migration of applications to the Cloud.