The Change Impact Analysis in BPM Based Software Applications: A Graph Rewriting and Ontology Based Approach

The Business Process Models describe and formalize the operations, constraints and policies of an organization. These models have firstly been used as abstract views of all the processes implied in an organisation. These served as inputs and outputs of the business analysis and re-engineering activities with no explicit relationship with the IT infrastructures which have been implementing business processes. In this paper, we deal with the BPM as higher abstraction level artefacts of software applications implementing the organisation processes. It presents our approach dealing with the change management of such applications. The approach is based on the graph based formalisation of all the software artefacts including the BPM ones. It provides an explicit management of various relationships conducting the change impact. The change operations are then formalized by graph rewriting (or transformation) rules. These rules implement both the change and the change impact propagation. The semantic knowledge concerning the various artefacts and the change operations is represented by an ontology. This ontology is intended to be able to automatically generate some change management rules. We use graph rewriting system (AGG) as a mean to formally specify and validate the result of our approach. The resulting specifications are then implemented using an integrated software change management platform appearing as a set of the Eclipse Workbench plug-ins.