Analyzing a Software Process Model Repository for Understanding Model Evolution

Process models play a central role in the process improvement cycle. Often, large process models evolve in an ad-hoc manner, a fact that may easily have critical implications such as increased maintenance effort. This highlights the need for supporting the control and management of process model evolution, a kind of support that is currently widely missing. Analyzing existing model repositories in order to better understand model evolution can be seen as a first step towards identifying requirements for process model evolution support. This article presents a study that analyzes the evolution history of a large process model with the purpose of understanding model changes and their consequences. Besides the study description, the article provides an overview of related work, and suggests open questions for future work.