Modeling Styles in Business Process Modeling
This work provides incremental insights into the process modeling process, aiming to help modelers create better business process models.
The study investigated whether different modeling styles exist in business process modeling by observing 115 students and clustering their interactions, identifying three distinct styles with significantly different characteristics.
Research on quality issues of business process models has recently begun to explore the process of creating process models. As a consequence, the question arises whether different ways of creating process models exist. In this vein, we observed 115 students engaged in the act of modeling, recording all their interactions with the modeling environment using a specialized tool. The recordings of process modeling were subsequently clustered. Results presented in this paper suggest the existence of three distinct modeling styles, exhibiting significantly different characteristics. We believe that this finding constitutes another building block toward a more comprehensive understanding of the process of process modeling that will ultimately enable us to support modelers in creating better business process models.