Traceability in requirements through process modelling, applied to social care applications

This paper relates experiences of using a business-process approach to the determination of requirements for social care systems. A method has been developed and used successfully with a number of major research projects, most specifically PLANEC. A protocol and framework are presented that utilise the Unified Modelling Language and adopts best practice from IT and social science methods. It utilises a loose-coupled hierarchical grouping of processes as a strategic view, and more tightly coupled models such as workflows. The method, as it has evolved, has produced a clear linkage between stakeholder goals and expectations, and IT functionality expressed as UML use cases