A business process explorer: recovering and visualizing e-commerce business processes

Abstract

A business process is composed of a set of interrelated tasks which are joined together by control flow elements. E-commerce systems implement business processes to automate the daily operations of an organization. Organizations must continuously modify their e-commerce systems to accommodate changes to business processes. However, modifying e-commerce systems is a time consuming and error prone task. To correctly perform this task, developers require an in-depth understanding of multi-tiered e-commerce systems and the business processes that they implement. In this paper, we present a business process explorer tool which automatically recovers business processes from three tier e-commerce systems. Developers can explore the recovered business processes and browse the corresponding source code. We integrate our tool with IBM WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM), a leading commercial tool for business process management and modeling. Business analysts could then visualize and analyze the recovered processes using WBM. The business process explorer eases the co-evolution of business processes and their e-commerce system implementation.