Business process models help understand the organizational process and the software that supports it. BPMN (Business Process Modeling and Notation) is the standard notation for business process modeling, and it is widely accepted in industry. BPMN models can elucidate the activities carried out by a software during its construction and maintenance. However, during the maintenance of the software that supports an organizational process, usually only the source code of the software undergoes modifications, even when inserting new features. The software design models, including the BPMN models, often become outdated over time and, in future maintenance, they will not help understand the business process in which the software is inserted and which the software aims to support. Such scenario highlights the importance of supporting the maintenance of BPMN models. However, what has been experimentally investigated regarding the maintenance of BPMN models? To answer this question, we performed a systematic mapping, which showed experimental studies, factors and technologies that influence the maintenance of BPMN models. These results present conclusions about the state of the art and gaps that can be explored in this field of research.

In the software maintenance, business process models help practitioners understanding of the software, because it represents the organisational process in which software is embedded. BPMN (Business Process Modelling and Notation) is the standard notation for business process modelling. However, it is common for the BPMN diagrams to be outdated, which, among other possibilities, may be caused due to the lack of adequate knowledge of some practitioners about the notation. It is important to provide means to stimulate the evolution of these models and, consequently, to aid in the learning of BPMN notation. With this focus, the authors proposed and evaluated the e-VOL BPMN, a technique that supports the evolution and the learning of BPMN diagrams. In this evaluation, they compared e-VOL BPMN with the BPMN 2.0 Poster, an artefact used commonly to support BPMN notation in companies. Participants who used the e-VOL BPMN in a scenario of diagrams evolution presented more correct BPMN diagrams and had a higher learning perception of the notation. In addition, in a written exam on BPMN notation, participants who used e-VOL BPMN scored higher. From these results, they notice that e-VOL BPMN support both evolution and learning of BPMN diagrams.

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Communication failures in software development teams can compromise the software quality. Therefore, identifying and mitigating risks for effective team communication are important activities in software development. Software models are one of the means of communication in development teams, because it communicates other members of the development team about the software. Thus, our research focuses on inspection techniques for identifying defects that affect the team communication through the software models. This paper presents a family of techniques for inspecting defects that affect team communication, called ComD2 (Communication between Designers and Developers). The ComD2 family was developed based on theories that investigate different ways of communication. For the time being, the ComD2 family has three specific inspection techniques for UML models, such as class diagrams, activity diagrams, and state machine diagrams. We performed a feasibility study and the results showed that the ComD2 family was considered useful for the identification of defects that affect the team communication through the software models.