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Making Sense of Declarative Process Models: Common Strategies and Typical Pitfalls

  • Conference paper
Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2013, EMMSAD 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 147))

Abstract

Declarative approaches to process modeling are regarded as well suited for highly volatile environments as they provide a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding and maintaining declarative business process models impede often their usage. In particular, how declarative models are understood has not been investigated yet. This paper takes a first step toward addressing this question and reports on an exploratory study investigating how analysts make sense of declarative process models. We have handed out real-world declarative process models to subjects and asked them to describe the illustrated process. Our qualitative analysis shows that subjects tried to describe the processes in a sequential way although the models represent circumstantial information, namely, conditions that produce an outcome, rather than a sequence of activities. Finally, we observed difficulties with single building blocks and combinations of relations between activities.

This research is supported by Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P23699-N23 and the BIT fellowship program.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Innsbruck, Austria

    Cornelia Haisjackl, Stefan Zugal, Jakob Pinggera & Barbara Weber

  2. University of Haifa, Israel

    Pnina Soffer & Irit Hadar

  3. University of Ulm, Germany

    Manfred Reichert

Authors
  1. Cornelia Haisjackl
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  2. Stefan Zugal
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  3. Pnina Soffer
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  4. Irit Hadar
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  5. Manfred Reichert
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  6. Jakob Pinggera
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  7. Barbara Weber
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Selmin Nurcan

  2. Public Research Centre - Henri Tudor, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Luxembourg

    Henderik A. Proper

  3. Information Systems, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Pnina Soffer

  4. Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    John Krogstie

  5. Aalen University, Beethovenstraße 1, 73430, Aalen, Germany

    Rainer Schmidt

  6. INTI International University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Terry Halpin

  7. Stockholm University/IbisSoft, Stockholm, Sweden

    Ilia Bider

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Haisjackl, C. et al. (2013). Making Sense of Declarative Process Models: Common Strategies and Typical Pitfalls. In: Nurcan, S., et al. Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 147. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38483-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38484-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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