Externalizing business rules from business processes for model based testing

Business Process Modeling (BPM) is a popular modeling technique for representing the activities of business processes. These techniques are widely used for documenting processes in large enterprises. In addition to capturing details of activity flows (e.g., workflows), these models also represent decision models for a given process. Decision models are used to represent not only the standard if-then-else type of branching of activities but also to represent business rules. The notation used to represent business process is called Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). In this paper, we propose a technique to identify and extract business rules that are embedded inside business process models represented using Business Process Modeling Notation. A source model <;P>; is split into to <;P', R>; comprised of the modified business process P' and externalized business rules R. We also demonstrate how the combination of process models along with externalized business rules represented by <;P', R>; can be used to identify test sequences in Model-Based Testing (MBT). We observe that externalization of business rules fosters generation of enhanced software artifacts for Model Driven Engineering and test artifacts for Model Based Testing.