Methodische Entwicklung von Modellierungswerkzeugen at INFORMATIK 2011 - Informatik schafft Communities
Berlin 2011

Abstract: Companies today use business process management (BPM) to define, design, document and improve business processes. For the subtask of business process modeling, companies can choose from a large variety of existing modeling tools. The development of the tools challenges software vendors due to the growing number of requested features (resulting in so-called feature creep). Moreover, groups of heterogeneous clients are using the tools. Hence, participation of software users in the development process is necessary for designing ‘usable’ applications. In this paper, we discuss the challenges in the development of business process modeling tools in terms of usability measurement with additional features. We present an integrated approach for evaluating usability in two ways: (a) testing overall tool usability and also (b) usability of single features. We focus on the different requirements of different user groups towards the tool and a single feature. As a proof of concept, we applied our approach to the development of a modeling tool in academic environment. The usability test is performed with respect to the tool. As single feature that is to be analysed in the proof of concept, we chose the user support for automatic layout in modeling tools.