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A data mining application: Analysis of problems occurring during A software project development process 2005 J Requirements Engineering (RE) van der Aalst, W. M. P. Business alignment: Using process mining as a tool for Delta analysis and conformance testing 2005 J IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)

The purpose for achieving strategic alignment between Information Technology (IT) and Business areas refers to the need of large organizations to exploit the IT's ability to deliver good products and services, thereby standing out in a competitive scenario. Within this context, Business Process Management and Service Orientation tend to gain space in organizations, since they are able to automate and optimize processes and services for the business. In the business process analysis and modeling phase, it is important to treat not only functional properties, but also process quality and operating constraints, usually grouped as Non-Functional Properties (NFP); thereby preventing that investments in IT are wasted on inefficiency and rework. In order to address these constraints, Business Level Agreements (BLA) and Service Level Agreements (SLA) should be used. The most prestigious languages for business process modeling, including Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), lack the representation of these NFPs. The approach proposed in this paper, BLA@BPMN, extends BPMN to embody BLAs, as part of a bigger approach to foster strategic alignment in this context. A BLA is specified in the process model level so that it can be mapped to a set of SLAs at the executable process level.

Electronic contracts describe inter-organizational business processes in terms of supply and consumption of electronic services (commonly Web services). The establishment of e-contracts in a particular business domain usually involves a set of well-defined common and variable properties. These properties are not fully exploited by the existing e-contract establishment approaches. Feature modeling is a software engineering technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the context of software product line. This paper presents a feature-based approach to support Web services e-contract (WS-contract) establishment. The approach aims at improving the information structure and reuse of WS-contracts, including the QoS attributes. Features are used to represent possible WS-contract elements in order to drive WS-contract template instantiation, thus acting as a configuration space manager. A toolkit named FeatureContract was developed to automatically support the proposed approach. A case study was carried out within the telecom context to show the approach feasibility.

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