On the State of the Art of Coupling and Cohesion Measures for Service-Oriented System Design

Service-oriented computing has encountered an increasing importance for enterprises over the last years. With Web services, the major underlying technical basis is already in an advanced state. The service design area, on the other hand, still provides several research gaps such as the field of service identification and in particular the determination of an optimal granularity level for services. Granularity, assessed through coupling and cohesion considerations, is yet a rather unexplored domain when it comes to service-orientation, although several results from earlier design principles are available. In this paper we summarize the current state of the art in granularity measures and identify the implications emerging for practice and re-search. As we reveal, several existing measures for other paradigms, which might be adapted for service-orientation, are left unconsidered. Further research gaps, as the mainly missing empirical evaluation or a tighter inclusion in the development process, are also detected

An Empirical Comparison of the Usability of BPMN and UML Activity Diagrams for Business Users

The widespread implementation of Business Process Management (BPM) strategies has increased the demand for an integral approach to business process modeling, in which all stakeholders can effectively participate and together shape a company’s business processes. Amongst others, this demand was a basis for the development of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as a proposed industry standard. It does not only provide technical advantages such as a support for serviceoriented computing, but also claims to be readily usable for business users. Following this presumption, BPMN is even used by the Object Management Group (OMG). It adopted BPMN instead of the Activity Diagram (UML AD) as the core standard to create a business modeling framework. For companies, however, changing to a new process modeling language is a significant expense factor. Furthermore, consolidated findings on whether BPMN is indeed more usable for business users than UML AD are missing. In this paper, we present results from a comprehensive empirical comparison of both languages, in which we examined the application by business users during a model creation task. Results indicate that the UML AD is at least as usable as BPMN, since BPMN did neither differ significantly in effectiveness, efficiency, nor user satisfaction

Sind Ereignisgesteuerte Prozessketten besser für Fachanwender geeignet als UML Aktivitätsdiagramme? Eine empirische Untersuchung

Die Modellierung und Verbesserung von Geschaftsprozessengehort zu den zentralen Aufgaben in Unternehmen. Umdiese Aufgabe ezient umzusetzen, ist es erforderlich, dassdie eingesetzte Modellierungssprache neben Analysten undEntwicklern auch Fachanwendern eine aktive Beteiligung erlaubt.Im Rahmen des Beitrags werden zwei weitverbreiteteSprachen, Ereignisgesteuerte Prozessketten und UMLAktivitatsdiagramme, empirisch untersucht. Im Mittelpunktsteht dabei die Frage, welche Notation fur Fachanwenderbesser zur Abbildung von Geschaftsprozessen geeignet istund durch welche sprachlichen Eigenschaften Unterschiedeentstehen. Grundlage der Untersuchung ist eine Studie,in der 73 Teilnehmer Geschaftsprozesse unter kontrolliertenBedingungen mit beiden Sprachen modellierten. Die Ergebnisseder Studie werden explorativ ausgewertet, um wissenschaftlichgesicherte Erkenntnisse uber die Eignung beiderSprachen zu gewinnen und zur Theoriebildung beizutragen

Quality Marks, Metrics, and Measurement Procedures for Business Process Models - The 3QM-Framework

The availability of high-quality business process models is a central prerequisite for a successful process management. Nevertheless, in practice process models exhibit a large number of quality deficits, among them grammatical, content-related, and stylistic defects. In addition, there exist only very few approaches to determine the quality of business process models. In this paper, we present the 3QM-Framework, an analytical approach to systematically determine the quality of business process models. The 3QM-Framework makes three contributions: it provides quality marks, metrics, and measurement procedures to quantify the quality level as elements of a theoretically justified quality model. The applicability of the 3QM-Framework has been empirically evaluated in case studies. The results of a survey that was conducted among experts moreover attest its practical relevance