Zooming in for Clarity: Towards Low-Code Modeling for Activity Data Flow

Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) is a widely used standard workflow language for modeling business processes. However, there is a growing need to integrate data and process models to enable a more holistic view of business processes to reducing implementation time through a clear understanding of the mode, and BPMN has limitations in representing data-related concepts. To address this, we propose an extension to BPMN called DataFlow BPMN (DF-BPMN), which is a low-coding visual solution, for modeling and analyzing the relationship between process and data. Low-code is a growing development approach supported by many platforms. It fills the gap between business and developer. Indeed, it enables quick generation and delivery of business applications with minimum effort. We introduce the Activity DataFlow, an extension of activity that allows zooming into the data manipulated within it, which enable different levels of granularity: control-flow perspective and data perspective. Additionally, we developed a tool for creating a model with the DF-BPMN. Our approach has been evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, and the results demonstrate that DF-BPMN offers significant advantages over BPMN.