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Information Systems and e-Business Management

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01-06-2010 | Original Article

Structuredness and its significance for correctness of process models

Authors: Ralf Laue, Jan Mendling

Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management | Issue 3/2010

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Abstract

Recent research has shown that business process models from practice suffer from several quality problems. In particular, the correctness of control flow has been analyzed for industry-scale collections of process models revealing that error ratios are surprisingly high. In the past the structuredness property has been discussed as a guideline to avoid errors, first in research on programming, and later also in business process modeling. In this paper we investigate the importance of structuredness for process model correctness from an empirical perspective. We introduce definitions of two metrics that quantify the (un)structuredness of a process model, the degree of structuredness and the unmatched connector count. Then, we use the event-driven process chain models of the SAP reference model for validating the capability of these metrics to predict error probability. Our findings clearly support the importance of structuredness as a design principle for achieving correctness in process models.

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Title: Structuredness and its significance for correctness of process models
Authors: Ralf Laue
Jan Mendling
Publication date: 01-06-2010
Publisher: Springer-Verlag
Published in: Information Systems and e-Business Management / Issue 3/2010
Print ISSN: 1617-9846
Electronic ISSN: 1617-9854
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-009-0120-x

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