Automating Execution and Verification of BPMN+DMN Business Processes

TL;DR

This paper introduces BDTransTest, a tool that automates the translation, testing, and coverage analysis of BPMN+DMN business processes, addressing the gap in verifying semantic correctness beyond syntactical errors.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to automatically translate BPMN+DMN models into Java programs for testing and coverage analysis, improving process verification methods.

Findings

Effective translation of BPMN+DMN to Java for testing

Automated generation of testing plans with coverage analysis

Experimental validation on literature-based processes

Abstract

The increasing and widespread use of BPMN business processes, also embodying DMN tables, requires tools and methodologies to verify their correctness. However, most commonly used frameworks to build BPMN+DMN models only allow designers to detect syntactical errors, thus ignoring semantic (behavioural) faults. This forces business processes designers to manually run single executions of their BPMN+DMN processes using proprietary tools in order to detect failures. Furthermore, how proprietary tools translate a BPMN+DMN process to a computer simulation is left unspecified. In this paper, we advance this state of the art by designing a tool, named BDTransTest providing: i) a translation from a BPMN + DMN process B to a Java program P ; ii) the synthesis and execution of a testing plan for B, that may require the business designer to disambiguate some input domain; iii) the analysis of the coverage achieved by the testing plan in terms of nodes and edges of B. Finally, we provide an experimental evaluation of our methodology on BPMN+DMN processes from the literature.