Include Other Processes within a Process

By using Includes when modeling Processes, you and other collaborators can hierarchically model an entire business process or user-system interaction. Since child Processes that are included with tasks can describe them in greater detail, you can keep higher-level Processes smaller and easier to understand.

With this in mind, it is a best practice to keep the number of user tasks in any given Process to 20. The maximum number of tasks and decision shapes that can be in a Process is 100.

To stay within these practical limits, a parent Process may describe a feature through generally stated user stories (or epics), where high-level user steps are used to broadly describe functional requirements. Child Processes included with each task and system task begin to define these user actions and system responses in greater detail.

To support this hierarchical modeling, when a task includes a Process, the user story generated for that task will have an [Epic] prefix added to its name.

In addition to Processes, you can include any other type of artifact that supports the task or system task definition, such as a use-case diagram. For more information, see the Include Another Process or Artifact Within a Process article.

Whenever you include another Process from a task or system task, the task's include indicator is enabled ().

Clicking the Include indicator displays the linked artifact. As soon as you have done this, a navigation trail appears below the main toolbar.

As you navigate through a hierarchy model, you are able to easily return to any parent artifact.

The navigation trail appears only for included Process artifacts, not other artifact types.