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                                5th SIKS/BENAIS Conference on Enterprise Information Systems




          A Survey of Variability Management
                    Requirements

              Marco Aiello, Pavel Bulanov, and Heerko Groefsema

        Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science
   University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 9, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands
                  {m.aiello, p.bulanov, h.groefsema}@rug.nl


Business process management (BPM) is impacting medium and large scale en-
terprises enormously these days. Designed to support rigid and repetitive units
of work like production processes, business process models offer little in the area
of flexibility and reuseability [1, 3]. By introducing variability to the world of
BPM, many new possibilities are introduced.
    An example comes from eGovernment. In the Netherlands there are 430 mu-
nicipalities that have to implement the same national laws, though, they are
different in size, business models, IT infrastructures and so on. Recently the
WMO law (Wet maatschappelijke ondersteuning, Social Support Act, 2007) was
approved that mandates, for instance, the rules for providing publicly subsi-
dized wheel chairs to needing citizens. All municipalities have to implement this
process, each with slight but clearly noticeable differences related to their orga-
nizational and IT structure [5]. The recurrence of the need to adapt processes to
instances and changes become concrete with the notion of variability [4], which
first emerged in software engineering. Variability in this case refers to the possi-
bility of changes in software products and models.
    In [2], of which this text is an abstract, we propose to use variability in
order to take full advantage of the obvious reusability opportunities in such
situations. Variability in this context, namely that of BPM, indicates that parts
of a business process remain variable, or not fully defined, in order to support
different versions of the same process depending on the intended use or execution
context. Such variability is often included through the introduction of so-called
variation points, that is, elements of a business process where change may occur.
A process in which variability is included is called a reference or generic process.
Processes where choices have been made deriving from the reference process are
called variants.
    We introduce variability management as an extension of the typical activities
involved in business process management. We give a general depiction in Fig-
ure 1. On the left, we notice how requirements drive the definition of the design
processes. Variability management complements these general BPM phases by
introducing a set of parallel stages, on the right in the figure. In this context,
two main stages are introduced: design-time and run-time variability.
    In [2], after defining variability in business process management, we consider
the requirements for explicit variation handling for (service based) business pro-
cess systems. eGovernment serves as an illustrative example of reuse. Finally, an




                                         35
Proceedings




                              Fig. 1. Process lifecycle and variability management.
              evaluation of existing tools for explicit variability management is provided with
              respect to the requirements identified. A video illustrating a first prototype to
              manage service-based business processes with explicit support for design time
              variability is available at http://www.sas-leg.net/web/index.php?n=Main.
              Demo2010.

              Acknowledgements
              The research is supported by the NWO Jacquard program via the SaS-LeG
              project, http://www.sas-leg.net contract 638.000.000.07N07. We thank P.
              Avgeriou, N. van Beest, F. van Blommestein, A. Lazovik, D. Tofan, and H.
              Wortmann for fruitful discussion.


              References
              1. van der Aalst, W., Jablonski, S.: Dealing with workflow change: Identification of
                 issues and solutions. International Journal of Computer Systems, Science, and En-
                 gineering 15(5), 267–276 (2000)
              2. Aiello, M., Bulanov, P., Groefsema, H.: Requirements and tools for variability man-
                 agement. In: Requirement Engineering for Services (REFS 2010) at COMPSAC.
                 IEEE (2010)
              3. Rinderle, S., Reichert, M., Dadam, P.: Correctness criteria for dynamic changes in
                 workflow systems: A survey. Data and Knowledge Engineering 50(1), 9–34 (2004)
              4. Sinnema, M., Deelstra, S., Hoekstra, P.: The covamof derivation process. In: ICSR.
                 pp. 101–114 (2006)
              5. Sun, C., Rossing, R., Sinnema, M., Bulanov, P., Aiello, M.: Modelling and manag-
                 ing the variability of web service-based systems. Journal of Systems and Software,
                 Elsevier 83, 502–516 (2010)




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