Learning from Quality Issues of BPMN Models from Industry

Many organizations use business process models to document business operations and formalize business requirements in software-engineering projects. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a specification by the Object Management Group, has evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. One challenge is BPMN's complexity: it offers a huge variety of 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 use from the practitioners' perspective are still missing. To close this gap, researchers analyzed 585 BPMN 2.0 process models from six companies. They found that split and join representations, message flow, the lack of proper model decomposition, and labeling related to quality issues. They give five specific recommendations on how to avoid these issues.