Cohesion and Coupling Metrics for Workflow Process Design

Workflow designers experience considerable freedom in designing the smaller steps (or activities) within a process. An operational notion of activity cohesion and coupling may help them to design more well-structured workflow activities. Inspired by resemblances between software programs and workflow processes, this paper gives an overview of software quality metrics and their applicability to workflow process design. New cohesion and coupling metrics – inspired by these software metrics – are introduced, which are integrated in a design heuristic. This heuristic can be used by workflow designers to identify the strongly cohesive and weakly coupled process design among several alternatives. The paper includes an application of this heuristic in a realistic workflow process setting.