Quality Assessment of Business Process Models Based on Thresholds

Process improvement is recognized as the main benefit of process modelling initiatives. Quality considerations are important when conducting a process modelling project. While the early stage of business process design might not be the most expensive ones, they tend to have the highest impact on the benefits and costs of the implemented business processes. In this context, quality assurance of the models has become a significant objective. In particular, understandability and modifiability are quality attributes of special interest in order to facilitate the evolution of business models in a highly dynamic environment. These attributes can only be assessed a posteriori, so it is of central importance for quality management to identify significant predictors for them. A variety of structural metrics have recently been proposed, which are tailored to approximate these usage characteristics. The aim of this paper is to verify how understandable and modifiable BPMN models relate to these metrics by means of correlation and regression analyses. Based on the results we determine threshold values to distinguish different levels of process model quality. As such threshold values are missing in prior research, we expect to see strong implications of our approach on the design of modelling guidelines.