A business process is a collection of linked tasks aimed at the delivery of a service. To this end, data is manipulated to manage properly the business. Business process execution refers to the run of a process by means of a software system. Many languages exist for modelling processes. However, the turning of descriptive models into executable software is mostly carried out manually by programmers, which turns out to be time consuming and error prone.
The goal of DRAPE is to develop interpreters capable of automatically executing on the fly business processes based on the models of the processes and of the data. These interpreters will work with different technologies in different domains and will provide support for both data-oriented and workflow-oriented applications.
In this way, the software being executed will not know how to run a given set of programming instructions. Instead, it will know how to interpret a semantic description of the business processes and the data, thus reducing software development costs while increasing the quality of the running system and facilitating business evolution. This eliminates market entry barriers, because of lower costs, while improving competitiveness, since companies will devote their efforts to think about the business and not to implement it.
DRAPE will be applied to different domains ranging from blockchain applications to healthcare information management systems.
In less than a century, the software market has grown from non-existent into a multi-billion dollar industry. Today, software forms the basis of many modern devices, such as PCs, smartphones, tablets and navigation systems, which we have come to rely on so heavily in our everyday lives. In the future as more and more devices and appliances are developed into "smart" devices, the software market will only continue to expand and evolve. Considering the rapid pace of development seen over the past decade, it is exciting to imagine what the software industry will be capable of in another 10 years time.
Software development worldwide is mainly performed by large players. In this backdrop, entry of small enterprises is quite difficult in the market dominated by established enterprises. Moreover, an aggressive competition among the major players to dominate the market brings in new complicacies for small startups.
One of the main reasons of these entry barriers to the market is the high software development costs since they oblige small enterprises to make investments very difficult to afford to become significant software industry players.
Based on studies reported in the general industry literature, the distribution of effort across the software development life cycle is typically along the following lines: 15-20% Requirements elicitation, 20-25% Analysis and Design, 35-45% Implementation (i.e. coding) and 15-20% Testing.
The overall goal of the DRAPE project is to drastically change the way software is developed by means of implementing a software system capable of automatically executing on the fly business processes by interpreting at run-time the semantic description of these processes and of the data they handle (i.e. a formal specification of their requirements).
From this perspective, software development phases will be reduced to only Requirements elicitation and Testing (only referred to assessment of the requirements since code testing would not be necessary any more), since all the rest would be automatically performed by the DRAPE interpreters. Therefore, with DRAPE, software development costs would be only the 25-35% of the current development costs.
For this reason, the use DRAPE will help to eliminate entry barriers to the software market while strengthening the business competitiveness of the companies due to resources savings in terms of development, updating, managing and/or patching their created software.
Moreover, this is done in parallel with improving the quality of the software provided, since companies will be able to devote their main efforts to thinking about the best way to perform the business itself, instead of having to care about how to implement it into a particular technology. This will necessarily have a positive impact on providing better services to users, who are the main consumers of these business processes. Since services provided by business processes address all possible areas of daily life (and not only those directly related to achieve economic profit), this might be also a significant contribution as far as improving of living conditions is concerned.