Tags:Business Process Model, Cost Estimation, Error Detection, Gateway Mismatch, Software Tool and Structuredness
Abstract:
This paper considers business process model structuredness issues, which are mostly related to inaccurate usage of gateways. According to related work in the process model structuredness domain, split gateways ought to match respective join gateways of the same type, while the existing mismatch measure allows evaluating model structuredness only by degrees of split and join gateways. Thus, the current measure of process model structuredness is not accurate enough and process model shortcomings may remain undetected, which may affect negatively model understandability, maintainability, and increase the error probability of business process models. Hence, error fixing costs may grow exponentially during later stages of the information system lifecycle. Therefore, we have proposed an improved gateway mismatch measure and a model to detect design issues and suggest changes necessary to achieve a sufficient level of business process model structuredness. The software tool for business process model structuredness analysis was developed to perform experiments with a large set of business process models of different industries. Analysis of obtained results, including sample business process models, detected design issues, and estimated efforts and cost-saving benefits are outlined. Conclusions were made, and future work was formulated.
An Approach to Business Process Model Structuredness Analysis: Errors Detection and Cost-Saving Estimation