Abstract
Previous research has put forward various metrics of business process models that are correlated with understandability. Two such metrics are size and degree of (block-)structuredness. What has not been sufficiently appreciated at this point is that these desirable properties may be at odds with one another. This paper presents the results of a two-pronged study aimed at exploring the trade-off between size and structuredness of process models. The first prong of the study is a comparative analysis of the complexity of a set of unstructured process models from industrial practice and of their corresponding structured versions. The second prong is an experiment wherein a cohort of students was exposed to semantically equivalent unstructured and structured process models. The key finding is that structuredness is not an absolute desideratum vis-a-vis for process model understandability. Instead, subtle trade-offs between structuredness and other model properties are at play.
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Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Mäesalu, R., Reijers, H.A., Semenenko, N. (2012). Understanding Business Process Models: The Costs and Benefits of Structuredness. In: Ralyté, J., Franch, X., Brinkkemper, S., Wrycza, S. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7328. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31095-9_3
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