An Experiment to Analyze the Use of Process Modeling Guidelines to Create High-Quality Process Models

Process modeling guidelines are an essential tool to help process modelers to create models that are correct and easy to understand. Many guidelines have been proposed in the literature, but there is little empirical evidence to which extent guidelines are effectively used. This paper addresses this research gap by presenting the results of a semi-controlled experiment conducted on two occasions with 21 students from a Business Process Management course. Two successive process modeling tasks were compared, one before and one after the subjects were presented to a set of 20 guidelines, which were collected through a systematic literature review. From the results obtained with the experiment, it was observed that the subjects would be more receptive to the guidelines if they were easier to understand and use.