Towards an Approach for the Evaluation of the Quality of Business Process Models

Like any software product, the quality of Business Process (BP) models is an important issue that must be addressed. Indeed, a poor-quality BP model can disturb its implementation and execution as well as its performance. In the literature, different studies focused on the evaluation of BP model's quality using quality metrics. The common challenge highlighted by these studies is the lack of a consensus on the thresholds of the used quality metrics and the difficulty of interpreting the values of these metrics. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses existing quality metrics to evaluate the quality of BP models in terms of comprehensibility and modifiability. Besides, we determine the thresholds of the different quality metrics through decision tree technique. Decision tree also produces a set of decision rules that are useful to determine the quality level of BP model. The approach is validated through a tool named BP-Quality that calculates the values of the quality metrics and deduces the comprehensibility and modifiability levels based on calculated values and the aforementioned thresholds.