Investigating expressiveness and understandability of hierarchy in declarative business process models

Zugal, Stefan and Soffer, Pnina and Haisjackl, Cornelia and Pinggera, Jakob and Reichert, Manfred and Weber, Barbara (2015) Investigating expressiveness and understandability of hierarchy in declarative business process models. Software & Systems Modeling (SoSyM), 14 (3). pp. 1081-1103. ISSN 1619-1366

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Abstract

Hierarchy has widely been recognized as a viable approach to deal with the complexity of conceptual models. For instance, in declarative business process models, hierarchy is realized by sub-processes. While technical implementations of declarative sub-processes exist, their application, semantics, and the resulting impact on understandability are less understood yet—this research gap is addressed in this work. More specifically, we discuss the semantics and the application of hierarchy and show how subprocesses enhance the expressiveness of declarative modeling languages. Then, we turn to the influence of hierarchy on the understandability of declarative process models. In particular, we present a cognitive-psychology-based framework that allows to assess the impact of hierarchy on the understandability of a declarative process model. To empirically test the proposed framework, a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods is followed. While statistical tests provide numerical evidence, think-aloud protocols give insights into the reasoning processes taking place when reading declarative process models.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Business process management, Declarative business process models, Modularization, Understandability, Cognitive psychology
Subjects: DBIS Research > Publications
Depositing User: Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert
Date Deposited: 25 Jun 2013 08:07
Last Modified: 03 Sep 2015 20:50
URI: http://dbis.eprints.uni-ulm.de/id/eprint/942

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