Translating business process models to class diagrams

Abstract

Choreography of business processes can track messages between different services. At the time of writing, there are no guidelines to draw a UML Class Diagram from the Business Process Choreography. This paper reports an experiment using a set of guidelines. Objective: Evaluate the subjects’ performance and perceptions when applying the BPc2Class-guidelines and BPc2Class-discovery process. Method: To measure the performance and user perception of both ways of mapping the processes, a comparative experiment was conducted with 38 subjects. The subjects, being master students, solved a process case in the first session and a guidelines case in the second session. A survey was filled in by the subjects to measure the user perception variables. Results: The results indicated that the guidelines showed significantly better results in five out of the six measured variables. Conclusion: Based on the findings and limitations of this research the use of guidelines looks promising, but future research is necessary to further generalize the conclusion.