  Declarative approaches to process modeling are regarded as well suited for
highly volatile environments as they provide a high degree of flexibility.
However, problems in understanding and maintaining declarative business process
models impede often their usage. In particular, how declarative models are
understood has not been investigated yet. This paper takes a first step toward
addressing this question and reports on an exploratory study investigating how
analysts make sense of declarative process models. We have handed out
real-world declarative process models to subjects and asked them to describe
the illustrated process. Our qualitative analysis shows that subjects tried to
describe the processes in a sequential way although the models represent
circumstantial information, namely, conditions that produce an outcome, rather
than a sequence of activities. Finally, we observed difficulties with single
building blocks and combinations of relations between activities.
