Business Process Management (BPM) is often adopted by organizations as a method to increase awareness and knowledge of their business processes. Business process modeling is used as a method to represent business processes in form of business process models. The number of organizations adopting BPM is quickly increasing. By this means, so is the number of business process models as result of a BPM initiative. Within a single organization the number of business process models often ranges from hundreds to even thousands. In order to handle such large amount of business process models, organizations structure them by the help of a process architecture. It includes a process map, which is considered as the top-most view of the process architecture where the organization's business processes and the relations between them are visually and abstractly depicted. The details of each business process shown on the process map are stored in the lower levels of the corresponding process architecture. The purpose of a process map is to provide an overview of how an organization operates as a whole without necessarily going into the process details. Therefore, the design of a process map is vital not only for the understanding of the company's processes, but also for the subsequent detailed process modeling. This is primarily because, a process map is often the result of the process identification phase of the BPM lifecycle, and is used as a foundation for the subsequent phases, where the detailed process modeling and process improvement takes place. Despite their importance, the design of process maps is still more art than science, essentially because there is no standardized modeling language available for process map design. As a result, we are faced with a high heterogeneity of process map designs from practice, although they all serve a similar purpose. This has accordingly been our main motivation for pursuing the research presented in this thesis. The research question for this thesis is the following: How to effectively model processes on an abstract level? In this thesis, we document the development of a language for designing process maps. In particular, we provide the following contributions. First, we present a holistic reference BPM framework. It is a consolidation of procedural frameworks introduced by prominent BPM researchers. The framework includes eleven BPM elements, each holding activities organizations need to consider when adopting BPM. Second, we provide a method for assessing cognitive effectiveness of process maps used in practice. For this, we follow the nine principles for cognitively effective visual notations introduced by Moody cite{moody2012physics}. In addition, we employ the cognitive fit theory to check whether the design of process maps has an effect on the BPM success in the respective organization. Second, we conduct a systematic literature review on the quality of modeling languages and models. We use the quality requirements we found as basis for developing the language for designing process maps. Third, we define the abstract syntax, semantics, and concrete syntax of the language for process maps. We follow an explorative method, hence we rely on empirical data for the language development. Accordingly, we reuse symbols in our language which have already been used in practice as part of process maps. We follow this approach in order to ensure the language will consist of elements already familiar to organizations. We evaluate the language by means of an experiment, in which we assess the effectiveness and efficiency of process maps designed using elements from our language against process maps that have not been designed using our language. Last, this thesis provides a method for testing the suitability of existing languages for specific purposes. (author's abstract)

In software engineering, software reuse has been a popular topic since 1968. Nowadays, Software Product Line (SPL) engineering promotes systematic reuse throughout the whole software development process. Within SPL, reusability strongly depends on variability. In this context, variability modelling and management are crucial activities that crosscuts all development stages. Different techniques are used to model variability and one of them is Feature Diagrams (FDs). FD languages are a family of popular modelling languages used to model, and reason on, variability. Since the seminal proposal of a FD language, namely FODA, many extensions have been proposed to improve it. However, the pros and cons of these languages are difficult to evaluate for two main reasons: (1) most of them are informally defined and (2) no well defined criteria were used to justify the extensions made to FODA. As a consequence, variability modelling and management techniques proposed in the literature or used by practitioners may be suboptimal. Globally, this work underlines that the current research on FDs is fragmented and provides principles to remedy this situation. A formal approach is proposed to introduce more rigour in the motivation, definition and comparison of FD languages. Thereby, examining their qualities should be more focused and productive. A formal approach guarantees unambiguity and is a prerequisite to define formal quality criteria and to produce efficient and safe tool automation. A quality analysis is necessary to avoid the proliferation of languages and constructs that are an additional source of misinterpretations and interoperability problems. The creation or selection of a FD language should be driven and motivated by rigourous criteria. Translations from one FD language to another should be defined and carefully studied to avoid interoperability problems. The main contributions of this work are: (1) to use a quality framework to serve as a roadmap to improve the quality of FD languages, (2) to formally evaluate and compare FD language qualities according to well-defined criteria and following a clear method, (3) to formally define and motivate a new FD language that obtains the best scoring according to the quality criteria and (4) to develop tool support for this language.

The dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the issue of quality in simultaneous interpreting. The theoretical part explores general questions related to quality in interpreting, namely the inherent difficulties encountered in defining quality, the issue of subjectivity in the assessment of quality, the different perspectives on quality and the issues surrounding the various quality criteria as suggested by different authors. The work focuses on the cognitive processes involved in simultaneous interpreting; concepts of working memory and cognitive load are discussed as well as their connection to the concept of interpreting as a decision-making process and a strategic behaviour. Quality is therefore understood as the capacity to efficiently and effectively manage available cognitive resources and to choose appropriate strategies to solve a particular problem in a specific interpreting situation, while taking into account the overall working conditions and the individual predispositions of the interpreter. The empirical part includes an analysis of actual interpreting of technical (legal) speeches. The technical nature of the speeches and the resulting linguistic and conceptual difficulties of the input material is considered to be a factor that increases cognitive load. The aim is to...