B1. Cheetah Experimental Platform (Barbara Weber)

The open-source Cheetah Experimental Platform (CEP) has been developed at the University of Innsbruck over the last few years for facilitating the execution of empirical studies. In this session I will give an overview of the main capabilities of CEP and explain how it can be extended to suit specific needs. CEP provides components that are frequently used in modeling sessions (i.e., modeling environment, components for training participants, and questionnaires to collect additional information, e.g., demographic data of modelers). The modeling environment is highly configurable, allowing researchers to conduct modeling session with different feature sets (e.g., different modeling elements or tool features). Moreover, CEP allows researchers to assemble the components to experimental workflows, providing user guidance during modeling sessions. To enable a detailed analysis of both the end product of modeling and the modeling process, CEP records all interactions with the modeling environment in an event log. Respective logs can be replayed after the modeling session step-by-step and every intermediate model version can be reconstructed. Moreover, CEP provides support for analyzing the collected data (e.g., by Modeling Phase Diagrams or various process measures). Implemented as a set of plugins, CEP can be easily extended by fellow researchers, for example, by adding new modeling environments (e.g., for a not yet supported graphical modeling notation). Barbara Weber is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), where she leads the research cluster on business processes and workflows. Barbara holds a Habilitation degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Innsbruck. Barbara has published more than 90 refereed papers, for example, in Data & Knowledge Engineering, Computers in Industry, Enterprise Information Systems, Information and Software Technology, and Software and System Modeling, has been serving as editorial board member for the Information Systems journal and the Computing journal and has been organizing the successful BPI workshop series. Moreover, she is co-author of the recently published book ?Enabling Flexibility in Process-aware Information Systems? by Springer. Barbara?s research interests include process model understandability, process of process modeling, integrated process life cycle support, change patterns, process flexibility, user support in flexible process-aware systems, and recommendations to optimize process execution.