BPMN was designed for the general modeling (and documenting) the processes of businesses, and in this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Dr. Michael Rowley discussed the kinds of people who are most likely to be successful at using the constructs. He argued that general purpose concepts of BPMN process modeling are probably too much for the typical business user, but proposed that BPMN can be used ONLY if the problem is significantly narrowed down. He explained that this is the exact approach that drove the Socrates design requirements. Michael then described how Socrates narrows the scope and uses a small subset of BPMN that business users can easily manage. To further illustrate his point, he demonstrated the creation of screenflows with a subset of BPMN. Michael also briefly demonstrated some of the more sophisticated BPMN capabilities and explained why they are needed for general purpose process modeling.

In previous episodes, Michael Rowley explained how Socrates simplifies the design of screenflows through the innovative concept of guidance trees. In this episode, Michael demonstrated how Socrates also simplifies how the data is used. We saw how Socrates screenflows could call automated steps, but unlike technologies that have come before, did not require the designer to map input and output parameters to variables. This unique approach allowed the domain expert to focus on creating the guidance tree logic and delegated the complexity of data mapping to the developer instead.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley debated how guidance trees offered a new paradigm for creating guided applications. He discussed what could be done with a guidance tree and explained how the metaphor simplified the design process over other approaches such as workflow and process modeling. Michael also demonstrated how the new paradigm could be leveraged in a powerful yet elegant manner to simplify the creation and manipulation of these trees. We ended the session with a very lively Q&A with the audience offering lots of comments, questions and viewpoints.

In episode 50 of CTO Tuesday Michael Rowley introduced Socrates, a new technology for creating Screenflows and demonstrated the guidance trees used to create them. In this episode, Michael postulated whether screenflows really are “business processes”. It’s not surprising to discover that the answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no. During the talk, Michael spent time diving into Socrates and how screenflows could be integrated with what would be unhesitatingly called a business processes.

CTO Tuesdays reached a significant milestone this week with its 50th episode. So to commemorate this occasion Michael Rowley unveiled a brand new product called Socrates. This innovative product was designed to enable business users and domain experts to build simple, yet powerful web applications that guide to successful outcomes. These applications can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics, up sell promotions or refund processes. In fact Socrates is useful for any customer service situation that requires a user to ask questions and receive answers in order to reach a good resolution. So sit back and watch how Michael effortlessly puts the product through its paces during its world premiere.

Approvals are one of the most common tasks performed by people in every organization and can range from a simple single person, sequential approval, to a complex parallel group voting process. The WS-HumanTask specification doesn’t explicitly describe how different types of approval patterns can be implemented. In this episode Michael explained how these different types of approval patterns can be supported. Michael also demonstrated how to use the ActiveVOS designer, the WS-HumanTask activity and the ActiveVOS Central task list system to show you how it’s done!

The WS-HumanTask standard doesn’t explicitly talk about how people can work together on a task or how someone can delegate another person to temporarily work on all of their tasks. However, these situations were considered during the development of WS-HumanTask specification and there are features in the standard that were designed to support them. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley described how collaboration and delegation can be supported using the WS-HumanTask standard and demonstrated how it works using the ActiveVOS Central task list system.

In this week’s episode, Michael covered one of the most widely requested topics of the CTO Tuesdays series and discussed how to use compensating transactions for long-running business processes. In addition to comparing and contrasting transaction managers with BPMS’s, he also showed how to use compensating processes to undo work when things invariably go wrong. As always the episode ended with a lively Q&A session with great participation from the audience.

In this week’s episode of CTO Tuesdays, Michael Rowley did an excellent job comparing and contrasting scenarios for using ESBs and BPMSs. He provided answers to many popular questions including: if you have a service-oriented BPMS, do you also need an ESB? Are ESBs completely unnecessary? Michael explored situations where BPMS functionality is all that’s needed and where it was appropriate to use an ESB. So whether you own both of these technologies, just investigating one or the other, or looking to leverage the best attributes of each, then I’d strongly suggest watching this episode.

An important aspect of business processes is who is allowed to start them. Not everyone is allowed to initiate every kind of process, and it is not just a matter of presentation. If you aren’t allowed to start a process, there should be no way of going around the UI in order to kick it off anyway. Proper authorization should be guaranteed at runtime. In this week’s episode, Michael Rowley discusses different strategies for process authorization. He describes standard authorization features that support simple authorization tests as well as architectural patterns that can be used to support more complex authorization scenarios.

In this week’s episode, Michael delivered a great introduction to the different types of expression languages for business processes. He explained how a business process works with data through expression languages to determine which paths to execute in a decision gateway. As a result, answering high-level questions like “was the requested loan a large one?” simply became a matter of evaluating process variables. He also explained the advantages and disadvantages of the most common expression language choices: XQuery, XPath and JavaScript. He finished the session with a demonstration on how both BPMN and BPEL allowed the process designer to use a mix of expression languages while building the process and running a simulation.

In this episode of “CTO Tuesdays” Michael described how to use test suites to ensure that our critical business processes continued to work as expected over time. The key to success was to take a leaf from the book of software engineering and regression testing best practices. This is because an executable business process is just like any other form of good code after all. Business processes should therefore have tests that guarantee they work as expected the first time, and suites of tests to ensure that changes to processes do not unintentionally break working aspects. Michael also explained both black box and white box testing approaches that should be used when we develop and deploy any business process.

In this edition of CTO Tuesdays, I looked at jBPM and asked the kinds of questions that I believe architects and project managers should ask before betting a project on jBPM technology. I started the talk with a quick discussion of how I chose the version of jBPM to evaluate. I ended up choosing jBPM v3, since jBPM v4 will never be productized and jBPM v5 isn’t done yet.

jBPM v3 is a mature technology that has continued to get new releases, so it seems to be the most relevant. The kinds of issues I looked into included the following:

• Is jBPM well suited to a service-oriented architecture?
• What is jPDL good at and what is it bad at?
• Once you’ve created a model, how hard is it to get the process to execute?
• Does jBPM’s “Process Virtual Machine” protect your investment in any way?
• How easy is it to include human tasks in process? Do they use standardized technology?

These and other questions are addressed as I provide a high-level look at jBPM 3 technology.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, I talked about the similarity between sequence flows (arrows) in a business process and the old GO TO statement from programming languages. In 1968 Edsger W. Dijkstra published a letter titled “Go-to statement considered harmful,” which marked the beginning of a movement within software engineering toward structured programming. Since that time, virtually all programming languages have encouraged a structured development style over the kind of “spaghetti code” that can result from using GO TO statements – until BPM. An executable business process is a program, by any reasonable definition of the word, but the sequence flow of BPMN (the arrow) is essentially a GO TO statement. In this talk, I explained why this is a good thing for business processes, and not the “harmful” thing that Dijkstra saw in the programs of his day.

In this episode of CTO Tuesdays, I talked about single sign on (SSO) and how the application that presents task lists to users should be able to fit into a SSO framework. The benefits of SSO are larger than just the convenience to users, including greater security and lower support costs. The talk also described the technology involved in SSO, including a brief introduction to public-key cryptography, transport level security, digital signatures, certificates and other security technologies. The choreography of messages involved in SSO was also described.