Reverse engineering of business processes exposed as web applications

Business processes are often implemented by means of software systems which expose them to the user as an externally accessible Web application. This paper describes a technique for recovering business processes by dynamic analysis of the Web applications which ex- pose them. This approach does not require full access to internal software artefacts, such as source code or doc- umentation. The business process is instead inferred through analysis of the GUI-forms exercised by the user during the navigation in the Web application which ex- poses the process. The recovered process is then ab- stracted by clustering its business tasks according to structural or logical criteria. A preliminary experiment has been conducted with the aim of evaluating understandability and readability of the reverse engineered business processes. © 2009 IEEE.