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can be evicted from Table 1 with reference to the
first cited activity.
The Artefact Adequacy, AtfA, is the metric that
reaches the highest adequacy value. This aspect also
emerges by looking at the coverage values.
Table 1 highlights that: the donation artefact is
taken in consideration by the business activities, but
the software system does not implement classes for
their automatic management. This is confirmed by
the fact that, some artefacts (category and article)
are considered by the business process, but not all
the operations needed for managing them are
implemented in the corresponding software classes.
In any case, Table 1 highlights that the business
artefact article is adequately supported, but the
positive values its adequacy reaches is negatively
affected by the assignation and donation
technological adequacy.
Table 2: TA and TC values obtained for Santaclaus.
METRIC NAME BEFORE
CHANGES
AFTER
CHANGES
Activity Coverage (AC) 0.428 0.500
Actor Coverage (ActorC) 0.334 0.667
Artefacts Coverage (AtfC) 0.600 0.833
Transition Coverage (TC) 0.500 0.571
Technological Coverage 0.465 0.643
Artefacts Adequacy (AtfA) 0.475 0.744
Activity Adequacy(AA) 0.375 0.571
Actor Adequacy (ActorA) 0.334 0.556
Technological Adequacy 0.395 0.623
Regarding the actor technological adequacy,
ActorA, it reaches the lowest value, highlighting a
bad support of the software system provided to the
actors involved in the activity execution. In addition,
the actor technological coverage, ActorC, confirms
this result, as just 1 of the 3 are automatically
supported.
From the assessment of the alignment level, it
emerges that the business process and supporting
software system were not aligned. Therefore, it was
necessary to identify evolution actions to be
performed for increasing the alignment. In
particular, focusing on the detailed values in the
second column of Table 1 the identified evolution
changes were the following:
- introduction of an automatic support to the
beneficiary’s activities. This need emerged from:
the low value of the Actor Adequacy, see Table 2;
the null value of ActorA
2
, concerning the
beneficiary actor; it was evident that the business
actor beneficiary was included in the business
process but not considered by the software system.
- In particular, two changes were required:
• Automation of the activity for receiving the
donation requests, named make a demand;
• Automation of the activity for introducing the
digital signature for the beneficiary user,
indicated acceptance of the signature.
The automation of these two activities implied
the implementation of the new class
BeneficiarySupport.
The automation of the first
activity also implied the complete automation of
activity receipt of a request.
- introduction of an automatic support to the
donation artefact. In fact, Tables 1 and 2 indicates
the low value of Artefact Adequacy with particular
reference to AtfA
2
, regarding the donation artefact.
- finally, the completion of the automation of
activity identification of goods to donate could be
reached through the implementation of method
searchUserAbout of the category class.
The execution of the planned actions required the
implementation of new classes and methods. This
brought to an increasing of the alignment level.
The improvement of the alignment level is also
demonstrated by the new values reached by the
Technological Coverage and Technological
Adequacy, as the third column of Table 2 indicates.
In particular, a good improvement can be observed
not only in the two parameter values, 0.643 and
0.623, respectively, but also in each coverage and
adequacy value. The third column of Table 1 shows
the analytical evaluations obtained after the change
execution. It is possible to evict that two of the three
business actors are supported by the evolved
software system, implying the increasing of the
technological coverage and adequacy with reference
to the actors. The implementation of the activities
executed by the beneficiary, brought to the
increasing of the measured characteristics of its
activities. The evolved software system supports 8
of the 14 activities, against 6 of 14 activities
supported by the previous version. Finally, the
number of the artefacts is increased in the new
software system, but all of them, except the
assignation artefact, are supported, favouring the
increasing of the technological coverage and
adequacy with reference to the artefacts.
4 CONCLUSIONS
This work proposed a set of metrics codifying the
alignment concept with the aim of measuring it.
The results of the evaluation of these metrics allow
VALIDATION OF A MEASUREMENT FRAMEWORK OF BUSINESS PROCESS AND SOFTWARE SYSTEM
ALIGNMENT
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