Declarative modeling: an academic dream or the future for BPM?

Declarative modeling has attracted much attention over the last years, resulting in the development of several academic declarative modeling techniques and tools. The absence of empirical evaluations on their use and usefulness, however, raises the question whether practitioners are attracted to using those techniques. In this paper, we present a study on what practitioners think of declarative modeling. We show that the practitioners we involved in this study are receptive to the idea of a hybrid approach combining imperative and declarative techniques, rather than making a full shift from the imperative to the declarative paradigm. Moreover, we report on requirements, use cases, limitations, and tool support of such a hybrid approach. Based on the gained insight, we propose a research agenda for the development of this novel modeling approach.