Recovering business processes from business applications

A business process, such as the process followed when ordering a book, describes the order of executing tasks (e.g., check inventory, verify credit card, and ship book). Business applications implement the business processes for the daily operations of an organization. Organizations must continuously modify their business applications to accommodate changes to business processes. However, business applications are often designed and developed without referring to the documented definitions of business processes. Modifying business applications is a time-consuming and error-prone task. To correctly perform this task, developers require an in-depth understanding of multi-tiered applications and the definitions of the business processes which they implement. In this paper, we present an approach which automatically recovers business process definitions from multi-tiered business applications. Given the starting UI screen of a particular business process, the approach recovers the process definition by tracing the flow of control throughout the different tiers of the business application. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a case study using 15 business applications from three large open-source projects. Our case study demonstrates that our approach can recover business process definitions from the implementation with high precision and recall.