Tying Process Model Quality to the Modeling Process: The Impact of Structuring, Movement, and Speed
This research addresses the problem of improving process model quality for practitioners in business process modeling, but it is incremental as it builds on existing studies of modeling behavior.
The study investigated how modeling behavior affects process model quality, finding that structured style, movement frequency, and modeling speed are connected to model understandability, with all three conjectures confirmed empirically.
In an investigation into the process of process modeling, we examined how modeling behavior relates to the quality of the process model that emerges from that. Specifically, we considered whether (i) a modeler's structured modeling style, (ii) the frequency of moving existing objects over the modeling canvas, and (iii) the overall modeling speed is in any way connected to the ease with which the resulting process model can be understood. In this paper, we describe the exploratory study to build these three conjectures, clarify the experimental set-up and infrastructure that was used to collect data, and explain the used metrics for the various concepts to test the conjectures empirically. We discuss various implications for research and practice from the conjectures, all of which were confirmed by the experiment.