Comprehension of Procedural Visual Business Process Models

Abstract

Visual process models are meant to facilitate comprehension of business processes. However, in practice, process models can be difficult to understand. The main goal of this article is to clarify the sources of cognitive effort in comprehending process models. The article undertakes a comprehensive descriptive review of empirical and theoretical work in order to categorize and summarize systematically existing findings on the factors that influence comprehension of visual process models. Methodologically, the article builds on a review of forty empirical studies that measure objective comprehension of process models, seven studies that measure subjective comprehension and user preferences, and thirty-two articles that discuss the factors that influence the comprehension of process models. The article provides information systems researchers with an overview of the empirical state of the art of process model comprehension and provides recommendations for new research questions to be addressed and methods to be used in future experiments.

An Empirical Review of the Connection Between Model Viewer Characteristics and the Comprehension of Conceptual Process Models

“…These contributions are important also for system analysis and design as they extend our knowledge about core subject matters of the field (Sidorova et al 2008) and the studentpractitioner dichotomy (Compeau et al 2012). They also complement recent research on the process of creating models (Claes et al 2015) and previous surveys of conceptual modeling research (Houy et al 2012;Figl 2017;Cognini et al 2016). In this way, we aim to contribute to improving the external validity of model comprehension experiments toward the population of practitioners (Venable 2007;Kock et al 2002).…”

An improved way for measuring simplicity during process discovery

“…In addition to these metrics, the control flow complexity and the cyclomatic metric of McCabe are proposed for measuring simplicity [5]. The control flow complexity is a measure which takes into account the complexity of the behaviour of a process model stemming from the use of different gateways and the number of outgoing sequence flows of these gateways [3,14,5,15,11]. The cyclomatic metric takes into account the number of activities and the complexity of the behaviour resulting from exclusive gateways [5].…”

“…The same reasoning can be applied for the average and maximum connector degree. The sequentiality negatively loads on dimension two, because if a process is sequential, it consists only of activities with exactly one incoming and outgoing sequence flow [3,11,12,15]. This means that there are less outgoing and incoming flows of nodes.…”

Cognitive Style and Business Process Model Understanding

“…[1,3,13]. Most of these works focus on the structural characteristics of the process model, such as the size, density, and complexity, that influence the readability, syntactic and semantic quality, and the understandability of the model.…”

“…The structural model characteristics that influence the occurrence of modeling errors and of process model comprehension are extensively researched, e.g. [1][2][3]. More recently, research efforts have focused on investigating how process modelers create a process model [4,5], on improving notations and visualizations of process models for better understandability [6][7][8][9], on identifying the cognitive biases that may lead to issues in the business process management lifecycle [10], and on personal factors of the…”