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What Makes Process Models Understandable?

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Business Process Management (BPM 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4714))

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Abstract

Despite that formal and informal quality aspects are of significant importance to business process modeling, there is only little empirical work reported on process model quality and its impact factors. In this paper we investigate understandability as a proxy for quality of process models and focus on its relations with personal and model characteristics. We used a questionnaire in classes at three European universities and 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 in model understandability, that self-assessment of modeling competence appears to be invalid, and that the number of arcs in models has an important influence on understandability.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Augasse 2-6, 1090 Vienna, Austria

    Jan Mendling

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Hajo A. Reijers

  3. University of Madeira, 9000-390 Funchal, Portugal

    Jorge Cardoso

Authors
  1. Jan Mendling
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  2. Hajo A. Reijers
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  3. Jorge Cardoso
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Gustavo Alonso Peter Dadam Michael Rosemann

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Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A., Cardoso, J. (2007). What Makes Process Models Understandable?. In: Alonso, G., Dadam, P., Rosemann, M. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4714. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75183-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75183-0_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75182-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75183-0

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