Artifact-based vs. human-perceived understandability and modifiability of refactored business processes: An experiment

Business processes modeling has proven to be effective and reverse engineering techniques with which to recover business process models when they are missing or outmoded have therefore emerged. Regrettably, these techniques often lead to models with quality flaws and consequently to models with low levels of understandability and modifiability. Refactoring has been widely used to deal with such flaws, altering the internal structure of models while preserving their semantics. There are several studies concerning how understandability and modifiability are affected by refactoring in terms of several artifact-based measures. However, there is little evidence regarding how refactoring affects quality in terms of human-perceived measures. The goals of this paper are, therefore: to collect further empirical evidence about the influence of refactoring on understandability and modifiability of business process models and to investigate the correlation between artifact-based understandability and modifiability and human-perceived ones. The obtained results are not trivial and show that business process obtained by means of reverse engineering has recurrent quality flaws, and the understandability and modifiability of business process models cannot be assessed by using artifact-based measures only. Human-perceived measures need to be taken in to consideration in order to have a more accurate evaluation.