Processes-of-business processes: a novel information source of systems-of-systems requirements

Abstract Alliances of organizations (joint ventures (JV) and merger & acquisition (M&A)) have increasingly been formed to achieve strategic business goals and, as a consequence, large, complex, software-intensive Systems-of-Systems (SoS) have emerged from the complicated interactions among software systems of different organizations/companies. By presenting unique characteristics, in particular, the emergent behavior, evolutionary development, and dynamic reconfiguration, SoS present a big challenge for the elicitation of their requirements, mainly due to ever-changing requirements that continuously emerge at run-time. At the same time, important information contained in the business process level that could serve as a source of these requirements has been neglected. The main contribution of this work is to present a novel source of information, referred to as Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP), to collect requirements of SoS. PoP refer to dynamic, large, and complex business processes formed from the complicated interplay of business processes of organizations that take part in alliances. We also present RE-PoP, a method that systematically extracts SoS requirements from PoP. To evidence the benefits of PoP and RE-PoP, we applied them in a real-world case study involving the Brazilian public health system. By providing a holistic, accurate view of large business processes, PoP together with RE-PoP can assist requirement engineers in the complicated task of identifying tangled requirements of SoS and its constituent systems, as well as providing traceability among them. Information from the business process level should be systematically used to derive SoS requirements, aiming at promoting the SoS sustainability and longevity that are tightly impacted by the business process level.