Anti-patterns for Process Modeling Problems: An Analysis of BPMN 2.0-Based Tools Behavior

Process modeling is increasingly conducted in business by non-expert modelers. For this reason, the increasing uptake of notations like BPMN has been accompanied by problems such syntactic and semantic errors. These modeling problems may hamper process understanding and cause unexpected behavior during process execution. A set of common modeling problems has been classified as anti-patterns in the literature. Up until now, it is not clear to which extent these anti-patterns can be spotted during modeling. In this paper, we investigate anti-pattern support based on a selection of prominent BPMN tools. The research contribution is two-fold: we demonstrate the importance of qualification of the analyst for the task of process modeling; and, we identify the need for process modeling tools to detect the use of anti-patterns, feedbacking the user more actively and explicitly about problems to be corrected in the process models.