Metaprocesses as Software Assets Reuse
Javier Darío Fernández-Ledesma
University Cooperative of Colombia, Department of Systems Engineering, calle 40 A N.41-05, Medellín, Colombia
Keywords: Metaprocess, Processes, Reuse.
Abstract: Software reuse in the early stages is a key issue in rapid development of applications. Recently, several
methodologies have been proposed for the reuse of components, but mainly in code generation as artifacts.
However, these methodologies partially consider the reuse of abstract models built for domain analysis and
business modeling. This article introduces a metaprocess-oriented methodology based on the model reuse as
software assets, and starting from the domain specification and analysis phases. The approach includes the
definition of a conceptual level to adequately represent the domain and a reuse process to specify the met-
aprocess as software assets. The methodology has been applied successfully in the field of e-health; in
particular a monitoring system for patients with cardiovascular risk has been modelled and analysed.
1 INTRODUCTION
Software reuse starting from the early stages of
software development facilitates rapid development
of applications. This contributes to increased
productivity and quality in software development [8].
Metaprocess metamodeling and its specification
as software assets for reuse in the early stages is a
field in which much effort is needed to standardize
software processes in the context of software
industrialization.
The purpose of this article is to present a
metamodeling-based approach intended to provide a
conceptual perspective for a domain, and its
specification as software assets to improve
metaprocess reuse in early stages of software
development. To illustrate the applicability of our
proposal, this article also presents a real example
currently running on the e-health domain: a
monitoring system for patients with cardiovascular
risk factors.
The remainder of the article is organized as
follows. In section 2 we discuss related work. Section
3 provides a description to the proposed approach.
Finally, we present the conclusions in Section 4.
2 RELATED WORK
There are several proposals regarding definition of
metaprocesses in the context of software
development. A metaprocess can be defined as a
complete process meta-model that serves as a
benchmark to be instantiated, including different
cases or situations for the same domain. This
metamodel contributes to the generalization of
processes through its metamodeling, specification of
methods, decomposition of tasks, and rules of
consistency. Rolland and Prakash (2000) conceive
metaprocesses as artifacts with general features for
instantiation, customization and gradual refinement
of processes and models. Therefore, Metaprocesses
are generic specifications of activities, tasks, roles,
and behaviors supporting the execution of processes
with the main objective of obtaining an abstraction of
the domain.
There are several proposals regarding
metaprocesses in the context of software
development, such as metaprocesses as
metamodeling-based models (Conradi and Nguyen,
1994) or methodologies for process-oriented software
development (Finkelstein et al., 1994). However,
none of them provide descriptions of the reuse of the
metaprocess specification as software assets for
instantiation and customization in the early stages.
Greenfield and Short (2004) define "[...]
metaprocess-oriented methodology can con-tribute to
raise productivity and quality in the software
construction process ". In particular, a methodology
that takes into account the abstraction of the domain
specification and process modelling, as well as its
specification as software assets for reuse in the early
stages can ensure shorter development times before
221
Fernà ˛andez-Ledesma J.
Metaprocesses as Software Assets Reuse.
DOI: 10.5220/0006224102210224
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design (BMSD 2016), pages 221-224
ISBN: 978-989-758-190-8
Copyright
c
 2016 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved

the release of applications. This can also reduce costs
in areas with strong demand for the development of
rapid applications in domains such as e-health.
Nowadays, there are several approaches that deal
with the use of metaprocesses, but, in general,
reusability is not taken into consideration in the early
stages of software development. Our objective is to
consider metaprocesses, as part of a generic
environment, that integrally support model-oriented
software development, taking explicitly into
consideration the specific domain.
Ramsin and Paige (2008) incorporate the use of
metaprocesses as an oriented methodology towards
model-driven software development. Their work
describes what has been accomplished in terms of
component reuse, but does not describe reuse of
models from the early stages of software
development. Ouyang et al. (2009) present a
methodological proposal which is oriented to
business processes models with BPMN and it
translate to BPEL. Ouyang et al. (2009) Proposes a
translation technique; but it don´t consider the models
reuse. Additional works have proposed a systematic
approach to modelling that accompanies the use of
metaprocesses in all phases of software development,
starting from the early stages, in order to understand
and analyse the domain, to design the software
solution and build its implementation. Kühne (2009)
incorporates the concept of metaprocesses into the
evolution of software processes.
Asikainen and Männistö (2009) consider the need
to semantically formalize software development
processes using the metamodel processes.
Levendovszky et al., (2009) incorporate the use of
process metamodel patterns as a first step in
formalizing specifications. However, these
approaches do not take into account the issue of
model reuse and its formalization in the early stages
of software development; they use independent
platform models and their implementation from the
domain, but none of them include the problem of
instantiation and customization through the reuse of
metaprocesses.
Cechticky et al., (2006) proposes to reuse code
components for real time applications. This proposal
is based on the reuse of code, but does not cover
models and metaprocesos. Park et al (2007), use code
components as software assets to facilitate reuse of
these components, which is done independently from
models. De Freitas (2009) incorporates flexibility
through the reuse of application code, without
addressing the issues of model and metaprocess reuse
for generating applications. Finally, Rodriguez et al
(2011) propose reusing design knowledge, in order to
reduce costs and difficulties in software development,
as a contribution to the methods developed in
collaborative systems such as groupware design
patterns, pattern languages and frameworks. These
other proposals do not include the theoretical and
conceptual articulation of metaprocess usage in
software development through the fostering of reuse,
instantiation and customization using platform
independent architectures, and the use of models and
metamodels as a contribution to software
industrialization.
3 A METHODOGICAL
PROPOSAL FOR THE REUSE
OF METAPROCESSES
This section introduces a methodology that consists
of one level design for the description of
metaprocesos (conceptual level) and a reuse process
(see Figure 1). The representation and construction of
metaprocesos begin from a generic metamodel, which
is specified using different models to fully represent
the domain, with customization applied at different
development stages, from specification of
requirements to design and software applications. We
seek for a sufficiently expressive and complete
representation of metaprocesos in order to cover the
conceptual domain with elements which facilitate the
reuse in the software development.
Figure 1: Metaprocesses specification levels as software
assets expressed in models.
The conceptual level is a generic abstraction of the
conceptual domain, which is represented through the
business domain, requirements, and process models.
The business domain model specifies the business
cycle: mission, policies, business and process
elements. The requirements model is based on use
case diagrams. The metaprocess is based on the use
of the BPMN standard. A metaprocess will be
specified, as described below, on the basis of the
business requirements captured through use cases and
Sixth International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design
222

process elements of the conceptual domain and their
relationships.
Consequently, the conceptual level is specified
using three steps as depicted in Figure 1:
1. The first step encompasses the representation of
the domain through the Business Domain Model
(BDM). BDM specifies business activities,
business tasks and business roles. BDM contains
diagrams such as the business diagram and
process flow diagrams. The process flow diagram
specifies the business activities and roles. In this
way, a business activity is conducted using one or
more activities process.
2. The second step is intended to build the
Requirement Model (RM), including use case
diagrams.
3. Finally, the third step is to build the Process
Definition Model (PDM), which includes
business process functionality both from a domain
perspective and from the perspective of system
support implementation for this software
component.
This is followed by the metaprocess construction,
based on information provided by the Domain
Analysis, using the BPMN Notation, in which the
activities (task in BPMN) and roles (swimlanes in
BPMN) of the Metaprocess are clearly identified, as
well as the use cases and applications or systems that
support the execution of the metaprocess. Each
activity and each role of metaprocess has been
specified with a set of applications or systems or part
thereof that support it execution for reuse in other
cases as components reuse.
The reuse process enables the representation of
metaprocesos as reusable soft-ware asset. Hence it
represents the metaprocess architecture with its
constituent elements specified as software artifacts.
The specification of reusable software assets
metaprocess as according to the standard is done by
identifying each metaprocess as a reusable software
asset with its component artifacts and attributes that
describe them. It is defined by use, solution and
classification, profile, related profiles and related
assets as reusable software component elements of
asset.
The reuse process is based on the OMG-AS and
OMG’s RAS standard, and uses a repository of
reusable software asset to enable storage and search
of assets in packed files, they contain these assets and
an XML manifest (XML Schema) and, they are
specified as .xsd as rasset.xml residing in the root
directory of the asset accompanied by the respective.
XSD or XML-Schema and another set of artifacts,
files or subdirectories that help specify. There
components are compressed into a single file with a
.Ras to facilitate management of its reusable software
assets.
Finally, this propose uses the mechanisms for
building well-formed models and Reusable Asset
Specification (RAS).
The mechanisms for RAS facilitate the search and
retrieval elements of the metaprocess as software
assets (models, components, artifacts) into
repositories. The OMG- RAS standard proposes the
organization of the files .Ras and rasset.xml file
structure, assets can be searched, retrieved and sail
them through services, which can be implemented as
Web Services or other approaches, which states for
each service the nature of the response and the
response.
In this case the implementation of mechanisms for
RAS it’s possible through our own repository Actives.
4 DISCUSSION AND
CONCLUSIONS
This methodological approach contributes to
specifying domains by means of conceptual levels.
These levels facilitate the creation of design models
independently from the platforms. In this manner, it
is possible to obtain an under-standing of the domain
with the purpose of correcting problems inherited
through deficient requirements gathering or a lack of
comprehension of the same. As a result, we obtain
specific elements at a conceptual level that can be
reused in the development of future applications.
Our approach follows the Model-Driven
Development (MDD) paradigm, through
transformation of models between the early stages of
the software development process.
The methodology proposed for the metaprocess at
the conceptual specification level as software assets
for reuse in the early stages of software development
is in-tended to facilitate the development of domain
process oriented applications, in this case for e-health.
This methodology facilitates the software
development process in one case, in which guided
models contributed to the development of
applications from the domain, independently from the
development platforms. Now, models, metaprocesos,
components and artifacts are being used to develop
other systems, such as an interoperability platform for
a pre-hospital system.
The monitoring system for patients with
cardiovascular risk, and the interoperability platform
Metaprocesses as Software Assets Reuse
223

for the pre-hospital domain has been implemented at
IPS University Hospital (Medellin, Colombia), and
this system is being requested by other countries and
other regional hospitals in Colombia.
The system has been evaluated by measuring its
impact on the indicators. Briefly, the statistics and
analysis of its implementation indicate that there is a
significant improvement in the allocation of hospital
resources and patient care times.
As future work, we plan to formalize the
methodology through the use of logic languages using
a formal definition Noguera et al. (2010), as well as
considering the use of patterns and their mechanisms,
for model reuse, as software as software assets not
specified in the OMG standard.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We thank DINAI of University Cooperative of
Colombia.
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