A study of different visualizations for visualizing differences in process models

Abstract

Finding differences between two processes can be a complex, time consuming, and expensive task. Our work is based on the difference graph approach which calculates the differences between two process models and – if available – their instances. In this paper we evaluate different possibilities for visualizing these differences. For this purpose we have selected some common visual properties such as color, shape, and size and evaluated these different visualizations with 31 participants through an online survey. Our results show that color coding and symbols were the preferred methods of the participants for depicting differences in a graph visualization.