On measuring the understandability of process models

Abstract

Much efforts are aimed at unveiling the factors that influence a person's comprehension of a business process model. While various potential factors have been proposed and studied in an experimental setting, little attention is being paid to reliability and validity requirements on measuring a person's structural understanding of a process model. This paper proposes the concepts to meaningfully argue about these notions, for the sake of improving future measurement instruments. The findings from an experiment, involving 178 students from three different universities, underline the importance of this topic. In particular, it is shown that the coverage of model-related questions is important. This paper provides various recommendations to properly measure structural model comprehension. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.