Two-Level Variability Analysis for Business Process with Reusability and Extensibility

Many of today´s businesses have changed from rigid siloed application approaches to more flexible business process focused solutions. Business processes are dynamic entities. At any given time, they must handle a variety of business situations that are changing over time. The business process model must be able to follow these changes, so it is necessary to support the systematic development of a set of similar business processes by understanding and controlling their common and distinguishing characteristics. Management of differences, which is called variability management, is considered the key in product-line development processes. That is, the methods of product-line engineering can be used to make the processes more responsive to changes in the business. This paper describes an approach for analyzing the variability of the business process. In developing the model for business process, variations are analyzed at different abstract levels in which the region of commonality is identified and the variations are refined. The model for business processes, explicitly representing commonality and variability, is described using UML activity diagrams.