Call for Book Chapters - Empirical Studies on the Development of Executable Business Processes

Scope of the Book

The Empirical Studies on the Development of Executable Business Processes book collects real-world experience on the development and practical usage of Executable Business Processes in Software Architectures, e.g. model-driven solutions that are built with languages such as BPEL, BPMN or ACM for the support and automation of digital business processes

Executable Business Processes are at the boundary between the business process management (BPM) and software engineering (SE) disciplines. Research into BPM tools to develop software solutions has produced many theoretical results, while practical implications and empirical applications are still poorly studied

Therefore, the ESDEBP book will collect and compile empirical studies, mainly case studies, that investigate questions of interests to both academia (e.g. identify challenges for which no solution exists; new insights into how existing approaches are really used) and industry (e.g. guidelines for using certain technologies; guidelines for modeling understandable executable processes).

We explicitly welcome authors from both academia and industry. However, we will not include product advertisements. Contributions should focus on clearly stated questions of interest/research questions, for example “How high is the proportion of data-flow logic compared to process-flow logic in executable business processes?”, “Why do developers (dis-)like BPMN modeling tools?”, “How useful are generated Test Cases from BPM models?” or “What defects typically occur in production environments when using service orchestrations?”.

If you are an industry author and have no experience in conducting a case study, you may contact us for further assistance. One good book on case study design is “Case Study Research in Software Engineering – Guidelines and Examples” by Runeson et al.
Also Easterbrook et al. freely published a slide-set for a tutorial on case study design for software engineers, which also contains a nice set of example research questions (slide 28).

Book Publication

The book will be published by Springer.

Topics of Interest

We welcome any empirical study concerned with the development of executable business processes. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Combination of Process Elicitation and Requirements Engineering approaches
  • Architectures for Executable Business Processes (incl. Microservice Architectures)
  • Dependencies between Integration Architecture styles (e.g. RPC, ESB, REST, Stream, Blockchain) and Executable Business Processes
  • Complexity of Executable Business Process Solutions
  • Developer Acceptance and Productivity of BPM Languages and Tools
  • Quality Assurance and Testing of Executable Business Processes
  • Typical Errors and Defects in Executable Business Processes
  • Efficiency of Static Model Checking
  • Understandability of Executable Business Process Models by different stakeholders
  • Agile Development with Executable Business Process Architectures

If you have any question about the topic that you want to propose, please contact the editors.

Submission and Review Procedure

In the first step, interested authors must submit a two-page proposal in PDF format about the topic of their case study and the empirical approach (to be) used. The submitted summary will be reviewed by the editors.
The authors of the best chapter proposals will be invited to submit a full chapter. The chapter must conform to a prescribed chapter structure, which will be distributed with the invitation. The chapter should be submitted as a LaTeX file, for which a Springer template will also be distributed and be no longer than 20 pages.
The submitted chapters will be reviewed by the editors and the editorial board. It is also expected that every author of a submitted chapter will review 1-2 other submitted chapters and provide constructive feedback.
In a second round, the chapter is to be improved by incorporating the review comments before it can be accepted for publication in the book.

All submissions must be done via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esdebp1

Important Dates

2017-10-15 Submission of a two-page summary
2017-11-01 Notification of summary acceptance
2018-01-14 Submission of the first chapter version
2018-03-04 Reviews of the first chapter version due
2018-06-01 Distribution of review results
2018-07-15 Submission of the revised chapter
2018-07-30 Notification of chapter acceptance
2018-08-30 Submission of camera ready
2018-10-01 Publication of the book

Editors

  • Daniel Lübke, Uni Hannover, Germany - daniel.luebke at inf.uni-hannover.de
  • Cesare Pautasso, USI Lugano, Switzerland - c.pautasso at ieee.org