Final Thesis: Handling Complexity in Organizational Modeling

Abstract: In information system development, the inherent complexity nature is transferred from the business domain to the software systems via the modeling phase. This thesis aims to handle the complexity issues in organizational modeling and the validation of this research is based on the resource visualization project at Audi AG. In order to examine the complexity issues in organizational modeling, a distinctive division of complexity patterns (structure-consistent and structure-flexible) in organizations was created. Meanwhile, in order to find a better solution for this research topic, two modeling approaches, Object-Oriented Modeling (OOM) and Dynamic Object Model (DOM), were employed to model and implement the identical business case. This research also formulated an evaluation framework where cognitive complexity metrics were used to assess UML class diagrams and software complexity metrics were used to assess the source code. Quantitative analyses between complexity patterns and modeling approaches were conducted. The results of the research indicate that compared to OOM, DOM demonstrated a complexity pattern independent characteristic. With DOM an application can adapt to both consistent and flexible organizational structures by only modifying configuration files without programming. With respect to the complexity and volume reduction effects in modeling and coding, DOM demonstrated far more effective performance beyond OOM, in all evaluation dimensions. In addition, DOM created more flexibility than OOM to adapt to the dynamic business in organizational modeling.

Keywords: Organizational modeling, dynamic object model, type object

PDFs: Master Thesis, Work Description

Reference: Yao Guo. Handling Complexity in Organizational Modeling. Master Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: 2015.