What makes process models understandable?

  • Authors:
  • Jan Mendling;Hajo A. Reijers;Jorge Cardoso

  • Affiliations:
  • Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria;Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

  • Venue:
  • BPM'07 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Business process management
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Despite that formal and informal quality aspects are of significantimportance to business process modeling, there is only little empiricalwork reported on process model quality and its impact factors. Inthis paper we investigate understandability as a proxy for quality of processmodels and focus on its relations with personal and model characteristics.We used a questionnaire in classes at three European universitiesand generated several novel hypotheses from an exploratory data analysis.Furthermore, we interviewed practitioners to validate our findings.The results reveal that participants tend to exaggerate the differences inmodel understandability, that self-assessment of modeling competenceappears to be invalid, and that the number of arcs in models has animportant influence on understandability.