Title: Improving the quality of business process models through separation of generation tasks in collaborative modelling

Authors: Michiel Renger; Job Honig

Addresses: Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Institute for Complex Molecular Systems, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Den Dolech 2, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, NL, The Netherlands. ' Section Systems Engineering, Technische Universiteit Delft, P.O. Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, NL, The Netherlands

Abstract: We describe an experiment in which we test how the quality of collaboratively built IDEF0 and UML models is influenced by the collaboration process. Two collaborative modelling approaches were compared: a 'free-form' approach and an approach that singles out the concept elicitation phase by means of a specific 'generation' pattern. An error classification framework was used to compare the quality of the resulting models. We found that the semantic quality of UML models can be significantly improved by an explicitly separated generation task.

Keywords: business process modelling; collaborative modelling; collaboration engineering; model quality; IDEF0; UML models; error classification; semantic quality.

DOI: 10.1504/IJODE.2012.045906

International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering, 2012 Vol.2 No.1, pp.106 - 126

Published online: 16 Aug 2014 *

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