Investigating Differences between Graphical and Textual Declarative Process Models
This addresses the adoption of declarative process models in business process modeling, but the findings are incremental as they show no improvement over existing graphical methods.
The study investigated whether a textual notation could avoid problems in understanding declarative process models caused by graphical lookalikes, but found that the textual representation performed worse in error rate, duration, and mental effort, with subjects preferring the graphical representation.
Declarative approaches to business process modeling are regarded as well suited for highly volatile environments, as they enable a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding declarative process models often impede their adoption. Particularly, a study revealed that aspects that are present in both imperative and declarative process modeling languages at a graphical level-while having different semantics-cause considerable troubles. In this work we investigate whether a notation that does not contain graphical lookalikes, i.e., a textual notation, can help to avoid this problem. Even though a textual representation does not suffer from lookalikes, in our empirical study it performed worse in terms of error rate, duration and mental effort, as the textual representation forces the reader to mentally merge the textual information. Likewise, subjects themselves expressed that the graphical representation is easier to understand.