Development of an interactive debugger for design and verification of business process

Abstract

The emergence of business process standards such as BPEL and BPMN has changed the BPM environment, especially in the modeling and implementation area. It is notable that the interoperability between execution engines and the compatibility between process models have been greatly advanced with these standards. These issues of interoperability and compatibility are important in the BPM research area and thus many researches have been done. But for the process designer in the field, it is more important to verify and debug the process model for the successful operation of business process before its deployment. Researches on the business process verification and debugging are however in the state of beginning. Tight interaction with the debugging engine is crucial to debug a business process. Thus the architecture of debugging system should be able to properly support these interactions for the efficient processdebugging. In this research, an interactive process debugger has been developed over the commercial BPM system that runs under the client-server environment. With this process debugger, we could easily verify our business processes and could successfully deploy them on the remote BPM server. The architecture that is designed in this research is simple and generic enough to be a reference for other BPM systems' process verification.