Beyond SDLC: Process Modeling and Documentation Using Thinging Machines

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is a procedure used to develop a software system that meets both the customer's needs and real-world requirements. The first phase of the SDLC involves creating a conceptual model that represents the involved domain in reality. In requirements engineering, building such a model is considered a bridge to the design and construction phases. However, this type of model can also serve as a basic model for identifying business processes and how these processes are interconnected to achieve the final result. This paper focuses on process modeling in organizations, per se, beyond its application in the SDLC when an organization needs further documentation to meet its growth needs and address regular changes over time. The resultant process documentation is created alongside the daily operations of the business process. The model provides visualization and documentation of processes to assist in defining work patterns, avoiding redundancy, or even designing new processes. In this paper, a proposed diagrammatic representation models each process using one diagram comprising five actions and two types of relations to build three levels of depiction. These levels consist of a static description, events, and the behavior of the modeled process. The viability of a thinging machine is demonstrated by re-modeling some examples from the literature.