An evaluation of the intuitiveness of the PGA modeling language notation

Abstract

The Process-Goal Alignment (PGA) modeling method is a domain-specific modeling language that aims to achieve strategic fit of the business strategy with the internal infrastructure and processes. To ensure the acceptance and correct understanding of PGA models by business-oriented end-users, an intuitively understandable notation is of paramount importance. However, the current PGA notation was not formally tested up to now. In the paper at hand, we apply an evaluation technique for testing the intuitiveness of domain-specific modeling languages to bridge that research gap. Based on an analysis of the tasks, we propose improvements to six elements of the initial PGA notation. Our research contributes a comprehensive description of the empirical modeling language evaluation, which enables the reproducibility of the evaluation procedure by the conceptual modeling community.