Evaluation of BPMN Models Quality - A Family of Experiments

The design phase is of special importance in the development of a business process. This phase refers to the modeling, handling and redesigning of processes, but when maintenance tasks have to be per-formed, this stage may be rather complicated. It implies a heavy investment of time and resources, since it involves both technical developers and business analysts. Moreover, process modeling should permit not only the production of models which are understandable to the users, but also the early detection and correction of errors. All of this adds to the overall quality of the model. We therefore propose a set of measures with which to assess the structural complexity of conceptual business process models. Our aim is to obtain useful indicators to be used when carrying out maintenance tasks on these models, thus obtaining higher quality models by means of an early evaluation of the model's given quality properties. With the development of a family of experiments, it has been possible to discover a set of measures which may be useful in assessing the usability and maintainability of conceptual business process models.