DSV Blog

The YAWL book, i.e. the book Modern Business Process Automation: YAWL and its Support Environment
is now published.

The book is the result from a cooperation in which several universities have been involved (seven universities and one center). The leadership has been shared by Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede (QUT) and Wil van der Aalst (TUE), who together with Dr. Michael Adams and Dr. Nick Russell are editors of the book.

Prof. Paul Johannesson and Birger Andersson and myself contributed with chapter 16 of the book. Together with Dr.Chun Ouyang (QUT) and Prof. Marlon Dumas (UT), I was also involved in the work of chapter 15. (We did some of this work during Chun’s visit at DSV)

The book was written as a teaching book and includes a large number of exercises. As a teaching means we also developed extensive presentation-material. The book is highly relevant for our BPM courses and I am considering it as a candidate for course book for the BPDI (Business Process Design and Intelligence) course next year.

I received a copy of the book from my colleagues at QUT. The photo is from my visit at QUT in February 2010.

I would like to welcome A/Prof Karim Baina and his phd student miss Soumaya Slimani from ENSIAS (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes) in Rabat, Morocco to DSV.
Karim and Soumaya will stay with us for the next three weeks. Among others they will participate in my course in business process management which starts next week. The visit is financed by SIDA and VR (The Swedish Research Council) through our MENA project.

During their stay, Karim will be sitting in office 7426 and Soumaya in 7427. Please feel free to contact them.

Requirements Engineering (RE) plays a fundamental role within the systems development process. The goal of this course is to bring in the concepts, methods and techniques needed in the eliciting, analyzing, documenting, validating, and managing requirements for complex information systems. It explains how requirements engineering fits into a broader systems development process, and provides an understanding of the main challenges in requirements engineering nowadays. During this course, you will learn how to:

– Identify stakeholders and their influence on the system requirements.
– Specify functional requirements using different modeling methods.
– Identify and classify and non-functional requirements, influences and constraints.
– Negotiate and prioritize requirements.
– Validate requirements.
– Document and trace requirements using computer-based tools.
– Manage changing requirements and establish traceability of changes.
– Practice the different roles in the requirement engineering process, by working in groups.
– Analyze the practical use of the latest scientific contributions within the RE subject.

Since requirements management is a multidisciplinary field and closely related to areas such as general management, project and product management, product marketing, and industrial design, students from a variety of disciplines can benefit from this course.

I have just returned from a six weeks visit at the BPM group at QUT, where I was invited by Dr Chun Ouyang.

During my stay I worked on:
1) A revision of our report on open source tools evaluation with the workflow patterns. The extended and updated version of the paper is available here;
2) A book chapter on open source workflow management systems.

At QUT, I attended the following presentations:
1) The Oracle Unified Method by David Burke (Oracle Corporation, USA);
2) YAWL and Second Life (a Youtube video of the product can be found here);
3) An Examination of Activity Labelling Practices in Process Modelling by Jan Recker’s.

A part of my work plan at QUT was to get familiar with the YAWL4film application. Chun was kind and gave me a detailed presentation and demonstration of the system.

During my visit at QUT, on demand by industry representatives, I also started the Workflow Patterns Google group, which is meant to provide a discussion forum for the workflow patterns. Your are welcome to join in.

I torsdags 29 maj besökte Peter Tallungs, Objectware, oss på DSV och gav en presentation om informationsmodellering. “Informationsmodellering har en nyckelroll inom verksamhets- och systemutveckling, men är trots det en till stora delar bortglömd och outvecklad konst.” (säger Peter)

Peter arbetar som verksamhetsarkitekt och verksamhetsanalytiker. Han arbetar för att skapa en ny generation verksamhetsarkitekter som kan arbeta nära de dagliga leveranserna, och därmed göra en direkt nytta och få effektiv återkoppling. Peter har i många år intresserat sig för att utveckla arbetssätten och kunskapen inom it-området. Han föreläser ofta på konferenser, han är styrelsemedlem i IASA Sweden (International Association
of Software Architects) och har haft en egen kolumn i Computer Sweden i fyra år. Han håller också kurser inom informationsmodellering, både hos Astrakan och i en egen Master Class. Peter har tagit fram ett nytt arbetssätt för verksamhetsanalys och it-krav, där vad han kallar “rika modeller” har en central roll. Arbetssättet används idag på många håll i branschen, även av stora företag. I synnerhet har Peter intresserat sig för informationsmodellens roll, som han anser är en nyckelroll.

Tack för den finna presentationen Peter. Vi ser fram emot fortsatta diskussioner och samarbete inom området.

Last Thursday, 25th of April 2008, Dr. Guido Governatori from University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane, Australia, visited DSV. Guido gave a presentation on Compliance Checking between Business Process and Business Contracts.

Abstract: It is a typical scenario that many organisations have their business processes specified independently of their business contracts. This is because of the lack of guidelines and tools that facilitate derivation of processes from contracts but also because of the traditional mindset of treating contracts separately from business processes. This talk will provide a solution to one specific problem that arises from this situation, namely the lack of mechanisms to check whether business processes are compliant with business contracts. The central part of this talk focuses on a logic based formalism for describing both the semantics of contract and the semantics of compliance checking procedures.

Thanks Guido for your visit and for an interesting presentation.