Business process modelling: five styles and a method to choose the most suitable one

A software developer facing a modelling task may follow different styles at different levels of abstraction and precision, to better cope with the aims and the potential users of the model. We address the problem of modelling the business processes by means of UML activity diagrams, and present five styles differing in the precision level, from the Ultra-Light style, where the nodes and the edges of the activity diagram are decorated by freely-formed text, to precise styles where instead OCL and UML actions are used. Then, we propose a practical empirical method for choosing the most suitable style depending on the context in which the models will be used (why, when, where, how long, by whom).