Investigating Differences between Graphical and Textual Declarative Process Models?

Abstract. Declarative approaches to business process modeling are re-garded as well suited for highly volatile environments, as they enable a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding declara-tive process models often impede their adoption. Particularly, a study revealed that aspects that are present in both imperative and declara-tive process modeling languages at a graphical level—while having differ-ent semantics—cause considerable troubles. In this work we investigate whether a notation that does not contain graphical lookalikes, i.e., a tex-tual notation, can help to avoid this problem. Even though a textual representation does not suffer from lookalikes, in our empirical study it performed worse in terms of error rate, duration and mental effort, as the textual representation forces the reader to mentally merge the textual information. Likewise, subjects themselves expressed that the graphical representation is easier to understand