On a quest for good process models: The cross-connectivity metric

Abstract

Business process modeling is an important corporate activity, but the understanding of what constitutes good process models is rather limited. In this paper, we turn to the cognitive dimensions framework and identify the understanding of the structural relationship between any pair of model elements as a hard mental operation. Based on the weakest-link metaphor, we introduce the cross-connectivity metric that measures the strength of the links between process model elements. The definition of this new metric builds on the hypothesis that process models are easier understood and contain less errors if they have a high cross-connectivity. We undertake a thorough empirical evaluation to test this hypothesis and present our findings. The good performance of this novel metric underlines the importance of cognitive research for advancing the field of process model measurement. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.