How Does Refactoring Affect Understandability of Business Process Models?

Abstract—Business process refactoring techniques have been often provided for business process manually modeled. Unfortunately, no many refactoring techniques lie in reversing business process models obtained from existing information systems, which need, even more, to be refactored. Hence, there is no strong empirical evidence on how the understandability of business process models is affected by this kind of refactoring techniques. This paper is aimed at providing a case study with two real-life information systems, from which 40 business process models were obtained by reverse engineering. The empirical study attempts to quantify the effect to the understandability of the order of refactoring operators as well as the previous refactoring actions. The main implication of the obtained results are a set of rules that may be used to optimize the understandability by means of the prioritization and configuration of refactoring techniques specially developed for business process models retrieved by reverse engineering. Keywords-Business Process, Refactoring, Understandability I