Complexity has undesirable effects on, among others, the correctness, maintainability, and understandability of business process models. Yet, measuring complexity of business process models is a rather new area of research with only a small number of contributions. In this paper, we survey findings from neighboring disciplines on how complexity can be measured. In particular, we gather insight from software engineering, cognitive science, and graph theory, and discuss in how far analogous metrics can be defined on business process models.

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A discourse on complexity of process models

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

Organizations are increasingly faced with the challenge of managing business processes, workflows, and recently, Web processes. One important aspect of business processes that has been overlooked is their complexity. High complexity in processes may result in poor understandability, errors, defects, and exceptions, leading processes to need more time to develop, test, and maintain. Therefore, excessive complexity should be avoided. Business process measurement is the task of empirically and objectively assigning numbers to the properties of business processes in such a way so as to describe them. Desirable attributes to study and measure include complexity, cost, maintainability, and reliability. In our work, we will focus on investigating process complexity. We present and describe a metric to analyze the control-flow complexity of business processes. The metric is evaluated in terms of Weyukerâ€™s properties in order to guarantee that it qualifies as good and comprehensive. To test the validity of the metric, we describe the experiment we have carried out for empirically validating the metric.

Business Process Control-Flow Complexity: Metric, Evaluation, and Validation

To achieve a systematic and holistic analysis and improvement of an engineering design process, the thesis on “A Structural Measurement System for Engineering Design Processes” proposes a measurement system that makes use of complexity metrics to embody various patterns of the interplay of a process’ entities (e.g. tasks, documents, organizational units, etc.). These metrics are used to draw inferences about the process’ behavior (e.g. timeliness, need for communication, risks, etc.). The 52 metrics are supported by a meta-model for process modeling and a framework to select the metrics in accordance with the goals of the process analysis. The metrics embody the foundations of network theory and the management of structural complexity to generate a practice-oriented application.

A Structural Measurement System for Engineering Design Processes

In addition to software’s ubiquity, the amount of code in most consumer products and systems is doubling every two to three years [6]. Consequently, software developers are scrambling to cope with the pressures of systems that are not only a couple of orders of magnitude larger and more complex than those developed a few years ago but also have to meet ever-increasing demands for quality and performance. The management of software development leaves much to be desired. This view was summed up by W. Wayt Gibbs in [6], “Studies have shown that for every six new large-scale software systems that are put into operation, two others are cancelled. The average software development project overshoots its schedule by half; larger projects generally do worse.” In view of the recurrent problems in software development, a significant effort has been invested over the last decade in developing models and identifying practices that can lead to more effective software management. For example, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in Bilbao, Spain, has pioneered research in the assessment and improvement of software processes in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense and major U.S. business organizations [7]. The principle motivation for SEI’s work is that “the quality of a software product is largely determined by the qualEUROPEAN SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Benchmarking European software management practices

Software management practice and metrics in the European community and Japan: some results of a survey

Software Configuration Management, by H. Ronald Berlack, Wiley (Book Review).

Z – An introduction to formal methods 2nd edn. Antoni Diller. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Chichester, U.K., 1994. ISBN 0 47 193 973 0, 374 pages. Price: £22.50, hard cover

David Mole

Papers

Software management practice and metrics in the European community and Japan: some results of a survey

Software Configuration Management, by H. Ronald Berlack, Wiley (Book Review).

Z – An introduction to formal methods 2nd edn. Antoni Diller. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Chichester, U.K., 1994. ISBN 0 47 193 973 0, 374 pages. Price: £22.50, hard cover