Si vous vous intéressez à BPMN (pour Business Process Modeling Notation), lisez avec attention cette note de Michael zur Meuhlen et Jan Recker.
L’article original joliment illustré, détaille quel peut être (doit être ?) votre connaissance e…

thank you for your feedback. Jan and I appreciate the time you took to look at our findings, even if you do not agree with our interpretation of the results.

We have posted a detailed response that strives to clarify several issues raised here.

Besides the points mentioned therein, let me explain a few things:

a) It is not our intention to discredit or badmouth the results of the BPMN standards process. I have been part of the BPM standards community for more than 10 years and I know how long it takes to produce a thoroughly vetted specification. But I see with concern the size explosion of standard specifications (BPMM 1.0 is 500+ pages…) and I have to ask whether it is more valuable to be feature-complete or to be extensible. Guy Steele gave an excellent talk at OOPSLA 1998 on the thinking behind Java, and I would be happy if more people actually read it.

b) Our research is not a critique of BPMN. It is simply a report on how practitioners use BPMN, based on empirical evidence. We are reporting on the actual count of BPMN constructs. Your point regarding the implied semantics that result from the use of multiple sequence flows originating from the same activity is well taken - we did not look at those modeling conventions. But we were interested in whether more people would use the Data-based XOR Gateway with the X or with a blank symbol, and found that even though the blank version is part of the BPMN core set, the X-marked version is more popular in the models we analyzed.

c) Our analysis follows the linguistic analysis of word frequency (not character frequency, as implied in your post - characters don’t have meaning or formation rules in most languages, but words do). Our study shows that the frequency of word usage in BPMN follows closely Zipf’s law, which applies to the words in the English language (and many other natural languages). So what does it mean when people use BPMN constructs like they would use words in a natural language? One could infer that they might form dialects, popular phrases, and creoles (or mashups) by borrowing phrases from other languages. An interesting finding from our data is that this distribution of usage frequency holds true even if we look a clusters of BPMN constructs - and the cluster analysis in our response post shows what the popular clusters are.

d) We have explained our research method in detail in the full paper that is linked from the original post.

1. The recommendation for “practitioners” (not including systems analysts who likely are primarily responsible for the creation of the BPMN diagrams) to start with a small group of objects is based on the reaction that most people have when faced with the full BPMN spec: outright terror at having to memorize what appears to be a huge set of complex symbols. Anyone doing any serious modeling is going to eventually learn many more than what he defines in the core set, but they have to start somewhere.

2. His statement is “vendors that are not supporting the entire BPMN vocabulary can assess what percentage of BPMN diagrams can be represented in their tool, and where enhancements should be made”, which I interpret to mean that vendors would use this to set priorities in their development efforts. Given that vendors don’t have infinite development resources, they sometimes need to make some decisions about what gets implemented when, and that quite sensibly should be based on what people actually want to do with the product.

As BPMN becomes more widely known and used, I expect the “core set” of most commonly used objects to expand significantly. What Michael seems to be observing is that people are really just starting to make some small steps from their old swimlane diagrams into BPMN, and really need to learn a lot more about BPMN in order to make it worth the trip.