Data-Driven Evolution of Activity Forms in Object- and Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract. Object-aware processes enable the data-driven generation of forms based on the object behavior, which is pre-specified by the respective object lifecycle process. Each state of a lifecycle process comprises a number of object attributes that need to be set (e.g., via forms) before transitioning to the next state. When initially modeling a lifecycle process, the optimal ordering of the form fields is often unknown and only a guess of the lifecycle process modeler. As a consequence, certain form fields might be obsolete, missing, or ordered in a non-intuitive manner. Though this does not affect process executability, it decreases the usability of the automatically generated forms. Discovering respective problems, therefore, provides valuable insights into how object- and process-aware information systems can be evolved to improve their usability. This paper presents an approach for deriving improvements of object lifecycle processes by comparing the respective positions of the fields of the generated forms with the ones according to which the fields were actually filled by users during runtime. Our approach enables us to discover missing or obsolete form fields, and additionally considers the order of the fields within the generated forms. Finally, we can derive the modeling operations required to automatically restructure the internal logic of the lifecycle process states and, thus, to automatically evolve lifecycle processes and corresponding forms.