Assessing the Best-Order for Business Process Model Refactoring

Quality assurance is one of the most critical activities in business process models which are obtained by reverse engineering, e.g., from existing information systems. Companies must deal with several quality faults in business process models such as irrelevant elements, fine-grain granularity or incompleteness, which affect understandability and modifiability of business process models. Hence, business process refactoring techniques are often used to improve these features, which change the internal structure of business process models while its external behavior is preserved. Unfortunately, different refactoring operators do not fulfill commutative property among them. For this reason, this paper addresses the challenge of establishing the best order in which to apply all the different refactoring operators and, therefore, to achieve the highest quality improvement. The research methodology consists of conducting a real-life case study to assess the influence of the refactoring operator's order in the understandability and modifiability of business process models. The case study demonstrates that there is a clear influence in these quality features in terms of the size and separability of the business process models under study