XVSM Micro-Room Process Modeler

Abstract

Most of nowadays modeling tools for creating business processes in enterprises can be used by IT experts to semi-automatically create corresponding software artifacts of the given process. Unfortunately, these tools comprise a lot of complexity, and therefore, they are not usable by ordinary end users. In this paper, we propose a modeling tool for ad-hoc business processes with a comprehensible and simple user interface that is usable by end users to model their daily life workflows. Afterwards, a fully executable application can be created from the model automatically. Also, we introduce a notion of the so-called “micro-room concept”, which is used as a basis for the abstraction of the modeling tool. The created micro-room framework allows designing peer-to-peer applications based on configurable, shared data rooms. The evaluation and comparison analysis of the modeling tool itself and the underlying micro-room concept have been done by means of usability studies. The preliminary results show that the micro-room concept uses a more comprehensible abstraction compared to other modeling languages. It is well suited for modeling simple collaborative tasks whereas other approaches are better in case of very complex processes. Further, the developed modeling tool is more intuitive than the competing ones due to the simplifications allowed by using the micro-room concept.