Applying Cognitive Psychology for Improving the Creation, Understanding and Maintenance of Business Process Models

Considering the wide–spread adoption of business process modeling, the role of pro-cess models has become ever more central. Still, industrial process model collections display a wide range of quality problems, resulting in vivid research on the quality of process models, business process modeling languages and –methods. This the-sis contributes to this stream of research by advocating the adoption of concepts from cognitive psychology for improving business process modeling languages and – methods. To address this rather broad research statement, this thesis focuses on two particular problems that are approached with the support of cognitive psychology. First, issues related to the creation, understanding and maintenance of declarative process models are analyzed. To counteract respective problems, the adoption of test cases, supporting the test driven development and maintenance of declarative process models, is proposed. By developing a prototypical implementation of the proposed concepts and employing them in empirical studies, the feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated. More specifically, empirical evidence for th