Towards a Catalogue of Process-Related Enterprise Architecture Smells
Process anti-patterns are a common technique for documenting counterproductive solutions to reoccurring problems. Process smells document a similar thing while only signaling that they could be a potential problem. Research, in this field, has analyzed and characterized anti-patterns in business processes; however, these business processes are mostly modeled in BPMN, which are related to low-level business processes leaving the organizational modeling out of its scope. While these findings can be used to evaluate and improve business processes from the technical perspective, the enterprise-wide view is still missing. These views are essential in informing business stakeholders about business-critical process issues and, ultimately, support the business decision-making process. This thesis seeks to derive a catalogue of process-related Enterprise Architecture smells to cover the enterprise-wide view in process-related issues. To achieve this, we first analyzed how Enterprise Architecture smells could be caused by process smells and the other way around in the form of a smell propagation and then derived a catalogue of Enterprise Architecture process smells based on taxonomy and bibliography of process smells done by another research group. As future research directions, we recommend the extension and empirical evaluation of the resulting EA process smell catalog and to measure the significance of the causal relationships derived from the smell propagation.
Contact Persons
Supervisor: Peter Alexander, SWC, alexander@swc.rwth-aachen.de
Examiner: Horst Lichter, SWC, lichter@swc.rwth-aachen.de
Related Work
Towards the Identification of Process Anti-Patterns in Enterprise Architecture Models Proceedings Article
In: 8th International Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Software Quality in conjunction with the 27th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2020), pp. 47-54, CEUR-WS, 2020.