ABSTRACT 

Many real-world activities can be thought of and described as well-coordinated, disciplined processes. For example, the real-world process of conducting elections usually consists of registering voters, helping these voters cast their ballots on Election Day, and then tabulating and possibly recounting the results. This talk will discuss how rigorous process modeling can be used to formalize real-world processes and allow for their analysis, and, potentially, improvement. However, such analysis can only lead to improvement if the process model faithfully represents the real-world process. Because in practice people often perform the same activities slightly differently, considering and modeling process variation may lead to increased fidelity between the process model and the real-world process.The talk will introduce some observed examples of process variation and discuss the challenges of modeling process variation. An example of applying process modeling to security requirements argumentation will be presented.

 BIO

Borislava "Bobby" Simidchieva is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, working with Professors Leon Osterweil and Lori Clarke on process definition and improvement with a focus on process variation. She is currently visiting Lero, the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, where with Professor Bashar Nuseibeh she is investigating the application of process modeling to security requirements argumentation. Before joining UMass Amherst,  Bobby graduated summa cum laude from the State University of New York, College at Brockport with a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computational Science.