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Cohesion and Coupling Metrics for Workflow Process Design

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Book cover Business Process Management (BPM 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3080))

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Abstract

Workflow designers experience considerable freedom in designing the smaller steps (or activities) within a process. An operational notion of activity cohesion and coupling may help them to design more well-structured workflow activities. Inspired by resemblances between software programs and workflow processes, this paper gives an overview of software quality metrics and their applicability to workflow process design. New cohesion and coupling metrics – inspired by these software metrics – are introduced, which are integrated in a design heuristic. This heuristic can be used by workflow designers to identify the strongly cohesive and weakly coupled process design among several alternatives. The paper includes an application of this heuristic in a realistic workflow process setting.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, NL-5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Hajo A. Reijers & Irene T. P. Vanderfeesten

Authors
  1. Hajo A. Reijers
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  2. Irene T. P. Vanderfeesten
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Computer Science, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt,  

    Jörg Desel

  2. Politecnico di Milano, Italy

    Barbara Pernici

  3. Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany

    Mathias Weske

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Reijers, H.A., Vanderfeesten, I.T.P. (2004). Cohesion and Coupling Metrics for Workflow Process Design. In: Desel, J., Pernici, B., Weske, M. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3080. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25970-1_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25970-1_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22235-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-25970-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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