A Template for Categorizing Business Processes in Empirical Research

Empirical research is becoming increasingly important for understanding the practical uses of and problems with business processes technology in the field. However, no standardization on how to report observations and findings exists. This sometimes leads to research outcomes which report partial or incomplete data and makes published results of replicated studies on different data sets hard to compare. In order to help the research community improve reporting on business process models and collections and their characteristics, this chapter defines a modular template with the aim of reports’ standardization, which could also facilitate the creation of shared business process repositories to foster further empirical research in the future. The template has been positively evaluated by representatives from both BPM research and industry. The survey feedback has been incorporated in the template. We have applied the template to describe a real-world executable WS-BPEL process collection, measured from a static and dynamic perspective.