Quality Metrics for Business Process Models

In the area of software engineering, quality metrics have shown their importance for good programming practices and software designs. A design developed by the help of these metrics (e.g. coupling, cohesion, complexity, modularity and size) as guiding principals is likely to be less error-prone, easy to understand, maintain, and manage, and is more efficient. Several researchers already identified similarities between software programs and business process designs and recognized the potential of quality metrics in business process management (Cardoso, Mendling, Neuman & Reijers, 2006; Gruhn & Laue, 2006; Latva-Koivisto, 2001). This chapter elaborates on the importance of quality metrics for business process modeling. It presents a classification and an overview of current business process metrics and it gives an example of the implementation of these metrics using the ProM tool. ProM is an analysis tool, freely available, that can be used to study process models implemented in more than eight languages.