Assessing the effectiveness of "Precise"Activity Diagrams in the Context of Business Process Modeling

UML activity diagrams are a commonly used notation for modeling business processes. In this paper, we present a novel precise style for this notation and a controlled experiment to assess its effective- ness. The context of the experiment is constituted of master students in Computer Science at the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen in Italy. The results indicate that the subjects achieved a significantly better com- prehension level when business processes are modeled using the precise style with respect to a “lighter” variant, with no significant impact on the effort to accomplish the comprehension tasks.