How to Measure the Control-flow Complexity of Web Processes and Workflows

Several Web process and workflow specification languages and systems have been developed to ease the task of modeling and supporting business processes. In a competitive e-commerce and e-business market, organizations want Web processes and workflows to be simple, modular, easy to understand, easy to maintain and easy to re-engineer. To achieve these objectives, one can calculate the complexity of processes. The complexity of processes is intuitively connected to effects such as readability, understandability, effort, testability, reliability and maintainability. While these characteristics are fundamental in the context of processes, no methods exist that quantitatively evaluate the complexity of processes. The major goal of this chapter is to describe a measurement to analyze the control-flow complexity of Web processes and workflows. The measurement is to be used at design-time to evaluate the complexity of a process design before implementation.

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