Guidelines

The guidelines were developed in order to support designers who are already familiar with the domain of business process modeling but lack knowledge/understanding of fCM. Users without any previous experience in modeling or business processes will only be able to use these guidelines to a limited extent. Based on the general structure of fCM, the guidelines are grouped by guidelines for Fragments, Object Lifecycles (OLC), Data Models, Goal State, and Consistency. These four categories represent the four artifacts of fCM while the fifth category represents suggestions for cross-artifact modeling, i.e., dependencies between, for example, OLC and the fragments. Furthermore, there are general guidelines for general modeling independent of the specific artifact. This grouping supports the designer in every way of modeling. It does not matter whether modeling is based on a process-first approach or other methodologies (cf. [Hewelt et al., 2018]). This preserves the flexibility of the user.

In general, a guideline consists of three required components (ID, Name and Description) and three optional components (Example, Motivation and References). This framework is based on the work of [Corradini et al., 2018] who presented modeling guidelines for BPMN. The closeness of fCM to BPMN motivated to adopt some suggestions and extend the framework in other parts.

• ID: A combination of a letter (first letter of the artifact) and a number uniquely identifies a guideline. For example, "F1" for the first guideline for fragments. This is only for easier assignment.
• Name: A short, concise name for the guideline that briefly tells the designer what it contains.
• Description: This explanation describes the guideline and its content in more detail.
• Example: It is used to visualize the content of the guideline and to make it easier to understand the guideline. The examples are all based on the Use Case of criminal justice. However, as it is not always possible to provide a helpful example, this component is optional.
• Motivation: Some guidelines cannot be derived directly from fCM, because the modeling approach often allows several ways to model a situation. However, based on the context and content of the process, one option should be preferred. The rationale for this is provided in this component.
• References: A list of literature for further information. This includes sources that have led to the theoretical foundation and formulation of the guideline.

References

[Corradini et al., 2018] Corradini, F., Ferrari, A., Fornari, F., Gnesi, S., Polini, A., Re, B., & Spagnolo, G. O. (2018). A guidelines framework for understandable BPMN models. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 113, 129-154.
[Hewelt et al., 2018] Hewelt, M., Wolff, F., Mandal, S., Pufahl, L., & Weske, M. (2018). Towards a methodology for case model elicitation. In Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (pp. 181-195). Springer, Cham.