A Systematic Approach to Derive User Stories and Gherkin Scenarios from BPMN Models

Business process modelling is the key to structuring and eventually optimizing the organization’s processes and provides the context to help produce quality information systems. To develop these systems, it is necessary to specify their requirements, which are obtained from documents, interviews, and from business process models. However, there is a lack of systematic approaches to bridge the gap between business processes and requirements elicitation and specification. This happens often due to failures in the communication between business analysts and developers, e.g., when the information present in one of the process models is not consistent with the requirements extracted in the development of a system that aims to optimize this process. This implies rework of requirements and/or business processes. Considering the agile methodologies for developing these systems, user stories are the usual technique to specify requirements. Providing a systematic approach for extracting these user stories from business processes will ultimately assist stakeholders in the elaboration of system’s functional requirements. To provide more detail to the extracted user stories and to handle exceptions in the business processes, the Gherkin scenarios can also be extracted from the models, which works as a complement to the user stories. The goal of this paper is to present transformation patterns for deriving user stories and scenarios from BPMN models to ensure traceability and consistency between business processes and requirements, and facilitating the communication between business analysts and developers.