“Precise is better than light” a document analysis study about quality of business process models

Business process modelling is often used in the initial phases of traditional software development to reduce faulty requirements and as starting point for building SOA based applications. Often, modellers produce business process models without following recognized guidelines and opt for “light” models where nodes representing the actions are simply decorated with natural language text. The potential consequence of this practice is that the quality of built business process models may be low. In this paper, we propose a method based on manual transformations to detect flaws in “light” business process models expressed as activity diagrams. Using that method we have executed a document analysis study with 14 business process models taken by books and websites. Preliminary results of this study show that almost all the analysed business process models contain errors and style violations (precisely 92% of them).