Abstract:
The objective of this research is to tackle a problem when defining a script for a script task of a Business Process Model and Notation or BPMN model, as scripting is usually done via a plain text editor without any assistance and it is difficult for users when writing scripts. The research also aims to unlock the BPMN model from being dependent on a particular execution platform due to its support for a particular scripting language. The approach taken is to provide a visual programming interface with execution semantics that is common to scripting languages and can be generated into executable scripts of different languages. The result of this research is a tool set that comprises 1) a language-independent XML-based Business Process Scripting language or XBPScript, 2) a visual script editor in a block building style of Blockly which can generate the XBPScript, and 3) a template-based script generator that can generate executable language-specific scripts from the XBPScript. To evaluate whether the tool set is usable, we integrate it with the open source business process management software called Activiti Explorer to build a BPMN model for an online shopping case study. Other evaluations concern productivity and learnability. On productivity, visual scripting is more productive than using a plain text editor at a significance level of 0.05. On learnability of visual scripting, we experiment with a group of programmers who are not familiar with scripting languages and a group of non-programmer users who are unskilled on writing scripts but may have to define business process models and script tasks. In both cases, the tool set shows good learnability at a significance level of 0.05 as the time taken by the programmers to write scripts improves between the experiments, and the average success rate of the non-programmers is over 60%.