Software Measures for Business Processes

Designing a business process, which is executed by a Workflow Management System, recalls the activity of writing software source code, which is executed by a computer. Different business processes may have different qualities, e.g., size, structural complexity, some of which can be measured based on the formal descriptions of the business processes. This paper defines measures for quantifying business process qualities by drawing on concepts that have been used for defining measures for software code. Specifically, the measures we propose and apply to business processes are related to attributes of activities, control-flow, data-flow, and resources. This allows the business process designer to have a comprehensive evaluation of business processes according to several different attributes.