PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a new approach to investigate complex processes, such as software development processes, using business process modeling.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents an investigation into the use of role activity diagramming (RAD) to model complex processes in the software industry sector, with reference to the process of TestWarehouse as a case study.FindingsSystematic extension and quantitative analysis to RAD models led to the discovery of process bottlenecks, identification of cross functional boundary problems, and focused discussion about automation of processes.Research limitations/implicationsFurther work is required to validate and evaluate the proposed approach using several cases with different application domains and thus generalize the adopted approach.Practical implicationsA new approach has been used successfully to understand and analyze business processes. The tools and techniques that are used to perform the approach are not complicated and do not need much specialist expertise, so the approach is not only oriented toward specialists but also toward organizations' managers and staff.Originality/valueNew techniques have been developed by using process modelling to deepen the understanding and analyzing of complex organizational processes. This research implements a practical investigation which uses a case study to validate the new techniques.
A novel process to discover test case patterns is proposed. This has led to the construction of a test case patterns catalogue. The catalogue has been analysed to estimate the potential reusability in different software applications. This has shown that 43% of system functions are generally application domain independent, whereas 57% are application domain dependent. Statistical tests showed that the level of specialisation in software systems could be as low as 20%, which supports the direction taken in this research to reuse test case patterns in software engineering activities, in particular, software cost estimation at the early sages of software development.
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