Declarative Versus Imperative Business Process Languages A Controlled Experiment

摘要

It has been argued that traditional workflows lack the flexibility to cope with complex and changing environments found in several business domains. The declarative approach surged with the aim of enabling more flexible business process management systems. Processes are designed in terms of activities and rules that constrain their execution. As such, declarative models are less rigid and prescriptive than workflows, since this approach focus on modeling what must be done and not how. Despite these arguments, there is no quantitative evidence that the benefits provided by current declarative approaches outperform the features of traditional workflows. In this work, we present the results of a controlled experiment conducted to empirically compare Workflow and Declarative approaches to business process modeling. A set of test cases is proposed to the participants to test their capacity to cope with unexpected situations. Our findings do not show signficative differences from adopting one process modeling approach or the other.