Exploring Business Process Transparency Concepts Claudia Cappelli 1 , Antonio de Padua Albuquerque Oliveira 1,,2 Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite 1 1 PUC-Rio – Pontifícia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro {ccappelli, padua}@inf.puc-rio.br www.inf.puc-rio.br/~julio 2 UERJ – Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro padua@ime.uerj.br Abstract Transparency has been, for long, a general requirement for democratic societies. According to Leite [6], transparency will be a central issue in producing software. This work assumes that, for providing software transparency, it is necessary that the processes to be supported or automated be transparent as well. As such, using a requirements point of view, it is necessary that organizations implement process transparency to enable transparency in their automation or support. This work is based on Business Process Management concepts, NFR framework and quality management. 1. Introduction In the U.S, after a major financial auditing scandal, congress established new requirements for financial transparency. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 [4], widely known in the IT industry as SOX, obliges companies to demonstrate more control over their financial processes. Another example is the BASLE treaty [7], a set of essential principles, to be shared by Central Banks in order to provide international standards for banking systems. Both of these are based on organizational process, software and information transparency necessity. But, what is organizational transparency? How can software supporting processes be transparent? Which kind of information is needed for the organization to be transparent? This work shows how the demand for transparency can be tackled with the NFR Framework and i* modeling. 2. Transparency concepts In order to understand this discussion, it is important to realize how we interpret “transparency” in the organizational process context. Although we did not find a formal definition for the term in this context, we decided to begin with in-depth research on the term in different areas by observing different meanings. From the literature review we gathered several expressions such as: complete information, objective information, trustworthy information, excellent information, easy access to information, understanding information and total opening communication channels. Process transparency is as a challenge by itself, and as processes are more and more implemented by software, the challenge is even bigger. We understand that transparency is a non-functional requirement (NFR) and, as such, we have used the NFR Framework [1] to describe transparency as a set of interrelated softgoals (non-functional requirements). 3. Mapping to the NFR Framework The NFR framework [1] allows softgoals arrangement in graphs with a deeper level of refinement in order to understand mutual effects through SIGs – Softgoals Interdependency Graphs. As our problem was to systematize the transparency concept, we established a correspondence between transparency characteristics found in the literature and some NFR types already catalogued in the NFR Framework [1]. We have used the following general heuristics to produce the SIG: a) first we studied relations among the types and separated them into groups, b) for each group we identified the dependencies between the types. c) If one type depends on others to be achieved, then this one will be placed on a higher level. The resulting SIG was composed of 36 nodes arranged in 3 levels. The 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference 1090-705X/07 $25.00 © 2007 IEEE DOI 10.1109/RE.2007.35 389