Ensuring Consistency among Business Goals and Business Process Models

The paradigm of service-oriented architectures has emerged as an architectural style for designing enterprise applications. Requirements engineering for such applications comprises the specification of business goal models representing stakeholder objectives and the operationalization to business process models that specify the required composition of services. Inconsistencies between business goals and derived business processes can lead to service compositions that are not in line with the actual stakeholder objectives. For preserving consistency it is required to consider logical and temporal dependencies among goals (e.g. the order in which they need to be achieved) in the derivation of business processes. In previous work, we provided a technique for the elicitation and specification of dependencies between business goals. Extending this approach, we aim at validating the consistency between business goal models and business process models regarding these dependencies. In this paper, we present a pattern-based approach for the automated generation of verifiable business process quality constraints from business goal models. We describe how these constraints can be used to check the consistency between business goals and business processes and demonstrate the applicability of our approach in a case study by using the implemented tool support.