An Approach to Business Process Modeling Emphasizing the Early Design Phases

This paper proposes an approach to formal business process modeling emphasizing the early design phases. That means, the focus is on gathering requirements of a business process in an informal environment. First, methods to systematically elicit all requirements are discussed. Then, it is suggested to formally model and validate the elicited requirements before integrating them to a formal business process model and verifying the model w.r.t. the formal requirements. The approach is inspired by techniques which have proven successful in the area of software requirements engineering. The key technique is the application of scenarios to bridge the gap between the informal view on the process by practitioners and the formal business process model.