A UML Activity Diagram Extension and Template for Bioinformatics Workflows: A Design Science Study

Abstract

Bioinformaticians execute daily scripted workflows, also known as pipelines, to process data. There are many tools to manage and conduct these workflows, but there is no domainspecific way to textually and diagrammatically document them. Consequently, this thesis, part of ongoing research, aims to extend the Unified Modelling Language (UML) activity diagram (AD) to the bioinformatics domain by including domain-specific and understandable concepts and notations. Additionally, a template was created to document the same concepts in a written format. A design science methodology was followed, where three iterations with seven domain experts tailored the artefacts, by extending the concepts and improving the artefacts’ usage, terminology, and notations. The extended UML AD and its concrete syntax received positive validations because of their simplicity. On the contrary, the written documentation template was rejected due to its amount of text and complexity. Another finding was that the domain experts requested a different software to do the modelling with the possibility to have the written documentation automatically generated from the drawn diagram to save time.