Business processes are nowadays recognized as one of the intangible business assets that provide more competitive advantage to organizations. Organizations must therefore be able to manage their business process models and deal with their quality problems, i.e. lack of understandability, maintainability or reusability among others. Such quality problems are exacerbated in business processes models that were mined by reverse engineering from enterprise information systems, since business process are more likely to undergo inconsistencies, redundancies, etc. Refactoring has proved to be a suitable solution to cope with these quality problems. Refactoring changes the internal structure of a business process model while preserves its external behaviour. This paper presents an in-depth systematic review for collecting, categorizing and analyzing all the refactoring methods and techniques applied to business process models. The systematic review is conducted following the formal methodology proposed by Kitchenhan. The review reports 206 related studies, from which 16 were considered as primary studies. The most valuable conclusion is that none of these studies proposes refactoring techniques for business process models previously obtained by reverse engineering, which is considered as a greenfield research area.
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