  Declarative approaches to business process modeling are regarded as well
suited for highly volatile environments, as they enable a high degree of
flexibility. However, problems in understanding declarative process models
often impede their adoption. Particularly, a study revealed that aspects that
are present in both imperative and declarative process modeling languages at a
graphical level-while having different semantics-cause considerable troubles.
In this work we investigate whether a notation that does not contain graphical
lookalikes, i.e., a textual notation, can help to avoid this problem. Even
though a textual representation does not suffer from lookalikes, in our
empirical study it performed worse in terms of error rate, duration and mental
effort, as the textual representation forces the reader to mentally merge the
textual information. Likewise, subjects themselves expressed that the graphical
representation is easier to understand.
