Toward enhanced life-cycle support for declarative processes Stefan Zugal*, Jakob Pinggera and Barbara Weber Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria SUMMARY The need for flexible process-aware information systems resulted in a recent interest in declarative approaches, as they promise a high degree of flexibility. However, the potential of current declarative approaches is impeded by deficiencies in understandability and maintainability. This paper proposes an approach toward better understandability and maintainability of declarative processes by adopting well- established techniques from the domain of software engineering. More specifically, the ideas of test-driven development and automated acceptance testing are adopted to interweave process specification and process testing. Thereby, during modeling, testcases balance the circumstantial/sequential information mismatch as well as improve understandability by dispensing with hard mental operations and removing hidden dependencies. Because testcases are also understandable to domain experts, they foster communication between domain experts and model builders, providing a common basis for communication. During process execution, testcases, in turn, help to document the reasons for process deviations and ensure that respective deviations can be easily considered during schema evolution. Furthermore, testcases ensure that no undesired behavior is introduced through process adaptations. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 21 June 2011; Accepted 21 June 2011 KEY WORDS: Business Process Management; Declarative Business Process Models; Business Process Life-Cycle; Process Model Understandability; Process Model Maintainability 1. INTRODUCTION In today’s prevalent dynamic business environment, the economic success of an enterprise depends on its ability to react to various changes like shifts in customer’s attitudes or the introduction of new regulations and exceptional circumstances [1,2]. Process-aware information systems (PAISs) offer a promising perspective on shaping this capability, resulting in growing interest to align information systems in a process-oriented way [3,4]. Yet, a critical success factor in applying PAISs is the possibility of flexibly dealing with process changes [1]. To address the need for flexible PAISs, competing paradigms enabling process changes and process flexibility have been developed, for example, adaptive processes [5,6], case handling [7], declarative processes [8], data-driven processes [9], and late binding and modeling [10] (for an overview see [11]). All these approaches relax the strict separation of build-time (i.e., modeling) and run-time (i.e., execution), which are typical for plan-driven approaches as realized in traditional workflow management systems. By closely interweaving modeling and execution, the approaches mentioned earlier allow for a more agile way of planning. In particular, users are empowered to defer decisions regarding the exact control-flow to run-time, when more precise information becomes available. 1.1. Problem statement Depending on the concrete approach, planning and execution are interwoven to different degrees, resulting in different levels of decision deferral. The highest degree of decision deferral is fostered *Correspondence to: Stefan Zugal, Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria. † E-mail: stefan.zugal@uibk.ac.at Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE J. Softw. Maint. Evol.: Res. Pract. (2011) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/smr.554