Coupling metrics for business process modeling

Modeling business processes is vital when improving or automating existing business processes, documenting processes properly or comparing business processes. In addition, it is necessary to evaluate the quality of a business process model through a set of quality metrics. One specific categorie of such metrics is coupling which measures the functional and informational dependencies between the tasks/processes in a business process model. Our contribution in this paper consists in adapting object oriented software coupling metrics for business process models. This adaptation is based on correspondences we establish between concepts of the Business Process Modeling Notation and object oriented concepts. The new adapted coupling metrics offer more information about the dependencies among processes and their tasks in terms of data and control. They can be used, for instances to evaluate the transferability effects of errors occurring in a particular task/process. Finally, we validate theoretically the proposed metrics.