Coupling and process modeling: An analysis at hand of the eEPC

Abstract

Business process modeling is a fundamental aspect in BPM initiatives. Being a central means of communication and documentation, both the quality and understandability of process models are decisive. However, the concept of process model quality is still not fully understood. The recent development has highlighted the role of coupling in models. Coupling is expected to represent an important dimension of quality for conceptual models. Still, contrary to software engineering, this perspective is hardly understood or adapted in form of metrics in process modeling. Therefore, this work collects diverse coupling metrics in the field of software engineering and transfers them to the eEPC modeling language. Once introduced and formally specified, the metrics serve for a discussion on coupling, process model quality with respect to coupling, and for their implementation.