Abstract:
Business analysts define business process models for describing a series of activities to produce services or products to serve business goals. Hence business process models represent business requirements for development of the software that enables automation of the business processes. When activities in a business process are changed, such changes also trigger changes in the artifacts that have been produced during the development of software, i.e. related documents and the software itself. Before a business process change actually takes place, an analysis of the change impact on the software is useful for the business analyst, software project manager, and system analyst to plan for change of the business process and software accordingly. This research proposes a tool to analyze business process change impact on software using traceability information, i.e. information about requirements and software artifacts that are relevant to the old business process model that is about to change. The old business process model is compared with the newly designed model that incorporates the changes so that the tasks that are changed and the types of differences between the two versions of the business process model can be detected. Change detection allows tracing from the changed tasks back to the documents and software artifacts that would also be affected by the changes. The business process change impact report issued by the tool can help the business analyst, software project manager, and system analyst when considering changing or re-developing the software in response to business process changes.