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A BPM software evaluation method
Li C., Cui H., Ma G., Wang Z.  ISDEA 2012 (Proceedings of the 2012 2nd International Conference on Intelligent System Design and Engineering Application, Jan 6-7, 2012)1-4.2012.Type:Proceedings
Date Reviewed: Sep 19 2012

Most probably, the only new content even a careful reader will be able to extract from this work is a list of 25 nonoperationalized, undiscussed, high-level criteria in six categories, superficially aligned for assessing the trust of a business process management (BPM) system. The other parts of the paper comprise approximately seven-eighths of the total length, including an introduction to the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), a description of an actual FAHP evaluation of three (unknown) BPM systems, and a comparison to the results of a “crisp” (that is, nonfuzzy) AHP evaluation. Unfortunately, this information is mostly well known if not trivial; at (too many) times, it is carelessly formulated in below average English, and is in certain places considerably unintelligible if not outright wrong.

The trustworthiness criteria closely follow the classical well-known nonfunctional requirements of any software system (for example, six availability or seven reliability criteria) and only contain five genuinely trust-related criteria: “anti-aggressive,” “self-improvement,” “BPM key module integrity,” “identification of attack,” and “easy performance of restoration.” Unfortunately, besides name-dropping, no discussion whatsoever on the meaning or operationalization of such constructs is presented.

Regarding the FAHP procedure, I was utterly confused by what is presented as “fuzzy AHP.” In contrast to standard fuzzy theory using triangular or deltoid numbers, membership functions, and suitable definitions of fuzzy operations (such as addition and multiplication), the authors seem to present (without proof or suitable references) a rescaled “crisp” version of AHP using a scale of 0.1 to 0.9 instead of the original 1 to 9 scale. Even though the authors also describe the application of their idiosyncratic AHP to three unnamed BPM systems in almost painstaking detail, the low quality of the English will make it almost impossible to follow, even for an outright expert in the field. Personally, I feel that would-be readers should Google “trustworthiness in software” and “fuzzy AHP” instead of fighting to understand this work.

Reviewer:  Christoph F. Strnadl Review #: CR140555
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