What we can learn from Quality Issues of BPMN Models from Industry

Many organizations use business process models for documenting business operations and for formalizing business requirements in software engineering projects. In recent years, the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a specification by the Object Management Group (OMG), evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. A challenge of BPMN is its complexity: the specification offers a huge variety of different elements and often several representational choices for the same semantics. This raises the question of how well modelers can deal with these choices. Empirical insights into BPMN usage from the perspective of practitioners are still missing. We close this gap by analyzing a large set of BPMN 2.0 process models from practice. We found that particularly representational choices for splits and joins, the correct use of message flow, the proper decomposition of models, and the consistent labeling appear to be connected with quality issues and give five specific recommendations how these issues can be avoided in the future.