Improving Understandability of Declarative Process Models by Revealing Hidden Dependencies

Smedt, Johannes De; Weerdt, Jochen De; Serral, Estefanía; Vanthienen, Jan

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-39696-5_6

Cited by 19 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…An approach by De Smedt et al [21] tries to improve the understandability of declarative business process models by revealing hidden dependencies. They conduced an experiment with 95 students.…”

Section: Empirical Studies On the Understandability Of Behavioral Conmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, current studies predominantly focus on technical contributions in specific application areas. Only a few studies focus on empirical evaluations of behavioral constraint representations [14,21,34,64,82,87], and even fewer of them are concerned with comparing graphical and textual behavioral constraint representations specifically [33,52]. Interestingly, the body of existing studies (cf.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

How Understandable Are Pattern-based Behavioral Constraints for Novice Software Designers?

Czepa

Zdun

2019

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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This article reports a controlled experiment with 116 participants on the understandability of representative graphical and textual pattern-based behavioral constraint representations from the viewpoint of novice software designers. Particularly, graphical and textual behavioral constraint patterns present in the declarative business process language Declare and textual behavioral constraints based on Property Specification Patterns are the subjects of this study. In addition to measuring the understandability construct, this study assesses subjective aspects such as perceived difficulties regarding learning and application of the tested approaches. An interesting finding of this study is the overall low achieved correctness in the experimental tasks which seems to indicate that pattern-based behavioral constraint representations are hard to understand for novice software designers in the absence of additional supportive measures. The results of the descriptive statistics regarding achieved correctness are slightly in favor of the textual representations, but the inference statistics do not indicate any significant differences in terms of understandability between graphical and textual behavioral constraint representations. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Formal language definitions.

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Section: Empirical Studies On the Understandability Of Behavioral Conmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Understandable Are Pattern-based Behavioral Constraints for Novice Software Designers?

Czepa

Zdun

2019

ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.

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“…For example, La Rosa et al() investigated the perceived usefulness and easy to use of different workflow patterns. De Smedt et al investigated how the understandability of declarative models can be improved by making hidden dependencies among them visible to users. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first evaluation about perceived ease of use and usefulness of an AO‐BPM approach.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A hybrid approach for aspect‐oriented business process modeling

Jalali¹,

Maggi

Reijers

2018

J Software Evolu Process

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Separation of concerns has long been an important strategy to deal with complexity when developing a system. Some concerns (like security) are scattered through the whole system, and different modules are tangled to such concerns. These concerns are known as cross-cutting concerns.When the system in question is a business process, cross-cutting concerns are aimed at being encapsulated by Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling. However, the state-of-the-art techniques in this field lack efficient mechanisms that (1) support composition of cross-cutting concerns that can be defined in parallel to (a part of) a process model and (2) enable specifying both mandatory and optional cross-cutting concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a new Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling approach. The approach is hybrid since it is based on declarative rules to relate imperative cross-cutting concerns and imperative business process models. The approach is explained, formally grounded with precise semantics, and used accordingly to implement the artifacts that support modeling and enactment of business processes in the proposed fashion as a proof of concept. In addition, the approach is evaluated on the basis of the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and easy to use. KEYWORDS aspect orientation, business process modeling, cross-cutting concerns, declarative rules, hybrid models INTRODUCTIONSeparation of concerns is an important strategy for people to deal with complexity. This strategy has been widely used and adopted in developing systems where designers can divide the specifications of systems into smaller individual modules. These modules can be managed, understood, and changed separately but integrated into a comprehensive, overall specification. The lack of a proper separation can lead to very intertwined complex systems, which are hard to be changed and managed.Business processes are examples of such systems, which can be defined through sets of constraints to fulfill specific goals. These constraints specify how activities in a business process can be managed, and they are categorized into 2 major groups. One group consists of procedural flow-based constraints that specify how a business process should be performed step by step. The other group consists of very flexible models suitable for specifying processes characterized by high variability, which can hardly be specified as a predetermined procedure. We call the models in the first group imperative models while those in the second group declarative models. 1 Imperative models specify the behavior of flow-oriented and rigid business processes. In these models, the behavior of a process is specified explicitly. Imperative models can be expressed using Business Process Model And Notation (BPMN), 2 Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL), 3 Petri nets, etc. In contrast, declarative models allow all behavior to happen unless it is explicitly forbidden. Thus, they suit...

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“…properties through the activities of a model and builds upon the prior work in [9]. It extends this work by explicitly addressing how constraints propagate their restrictions over activities, as illustrated in Section 3, and forms the backdrop for building dependency structures for the whole model.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…The technique has been tested in an empirical evaluation in which 146 novice modelers participated. The results are reported in greater detail with a more in-depth statistical analysis using more factors, and a bigger sample than in [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering hidden dependencies in constraint-based declarative process models for improving understandability

Smedt

Weerdt²,

Serral³

et al. 2018

Information Systems

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Vanthienen, J 2018, 'Discovering hidden dependencies in constraint-based declarative process models for improving understandability ', Information Systems, vol. 74,no. 1,. https://doi. AbstractFlexible systems and services require a solid approach for modeling and enacting dynamic behavior. Declarative process models gained plenty of traction lately as they have proven to provide a good fit for the problem at hand, i.e. visualizing and executing flexible business processes. These models are based on constraints that impose behavioral restrictions on process behavior. Essentially, a declarative model is a set of constraints defined over the set of activities in a process. While allowing for very flexible process specifications, a major downside is that the combination of constraints can lead to behavioral restrictions not explicitly visible when reading a model. These restrictions, so-called hidden dependencies, make the models much more difficult to understand. This paper presents a technique for discovering hidden dependencies and making them explicit by means of dependency structures. Experiments with novice process modelers demonstrate that the proposed technique lowers the cognitive effort necessary to comprehend a constraint-based process model.

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Improving Understandability of Declarative Process Models by Revealing Hidden Dependencies

Cited by 19 publications

References 19 publications

How Understandable Are Pattern-based Behavioral Constraints for Novice Software Designers?

How Understandable Are Pattern-based Behavioral Constraints for Novice Software Designers?

A hybrid approach for aspect‐oriented business process modeling

Discovering hidden dependencies in constraint-based declarative process models for improving understandability

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