A plug-in for Eclipse towards supporting business process lines documentation

Business process models enable to understand and improve the organization´s business in order to stay competitive in the market. However, this artifact is not commonly elaborated due to time and costs associated. Thus, it was observed the importance of the practice of reutilization of business process models, making use of specific techniques such as the Business Process Line (BPL) that was originated from concepts of Software Product Line (SPL). As seen in SPL, in order to aid the creation, instantiation and evolution of BPLs, the usage of computational tools is also very important in the context of BPL, due mainly to the complexity and dynamism from businesses. Despite the growing academic interest in the area, no specific tools with support to build and document BPLs using features model, BPMN and BPMN* notations were found in the literature. This paper presents an Eclipse plug-in that supports the creation and documentation of BPLs, named BPL-Framework, which uses the aforementioned notations. Based on an evaluation done by individuals with different levels of knowledge about BPL, the BPL-Framework was considered to be satisfactory in relation to functional suitability (accuracy), operability (ease of use, learnability and attractiveness) and transferability (portability, adaptability and installability) from the ISO/IEC 25010.