Investigating expressiveness and understandability of hierarchy in declarative business process models

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 Communicated by Dr. Selmin Nurcan. 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.

Understanding Declare models: strategies, pitfalls, empirical results

“…The exploratory study is part of a larger investigation on declarative process models [68]. While [68] focused on quantitative results, the exploratory study contained in this paper and presented in [22] describes solely qualitative data.…”

“…In addition, we examine strategies for understanding declarative models. Since the sense-making of hierarchical Declare models was already addressed in [68] and no additional strategies for understanding could be observed in hierarchical models, we did not pursue the sense-making of hierarchical models in the follow-up study. In the follow-up study, iterative and sequential reading of Declare models could not be confirmed as a single prevailing strategy for making sense of declarative models, but two distinct strategies could be identified (that coincided in the exploratory study due to the used material).…”

Towards Collecting Sustainability Data in Supply Chains with Flexible Data Collection Processes

“…Examples are DECLARE [31] and ALASKA [32]. However, declarative approaches have specific shortcomings concerning understandability [30]. Furthermore and even more important in our context, if no clear activity sequencing is specified, all activities relating to monitoring are difficult to satisfy and monitoring is a crucial requirement for the industry in this case.…”

“…As aforementioned, another way to introduce flexibility to processes is by specifying them in a declarative way, which does not prescribe a rigid activity sequencing [30]. Instead, a number of declarative rules constraints may be used to specify certain facts the process execution must conform to, e.g., mutual exclusion of activities.…”

The Structured Process Modeling Theory (SPMT) a cognitive view on why and how modelers benefit from structuring the process of process modeling

“…The consideration of the first part of the SPMTdescribing how serialization of the modeling effort helps reducing intrinsic cognitive load -has been touched before (Rockwell and Bajaj 2005;Soffer et al 2012). Yet, the idea of structuring the construction process of the process model (i.e., the second part of the SPMT) seems more original, although structuredness of the outcome of such a construction process is well studied (Laue and Mendling 2010;Zugal et al 2013). Also in software engineering for example, there are many studies about the structuredness of program code (e.g., procedural versus object-oriented code (Wiedenbeck and Ramalingam 1999)).…”