BPMN Modeler Eclipse Sub-project

Intalio has announced a move to raise the status of the BPMN Modeler component to
a sub-project under the top level project Eclipse SOA Tools
Platform (STP).

The BPMN sub-project will focus on building an usable and extensible
graphical modeler by leveraging the tools provided by the Graphical
Modeling Framework and the EMF Validation Framework.

• Provide a first class user experience when it comes to designing processes, using graphical assistants.
• Provide a graphical notation according to the BPMN standard.
• Provide ways to extend the modeler to integrate it within commercial products.

Great stuff.
Let us avoid the situation where people describing their view of the real world are constrained by a developer's pain of how the real world may have to be transformed into code.
I would really like to see a mandate to allow modelling in line with major proposals in BPMN rather than limited to published specifications. This seems to be a real benefit of extensibility. Perhaps it is a bit late for BPMN 2.0 but it would be good to be able to explore major changes within the normal modelling toolset.

Adventures in BPMN?

Keith Harrison-Broninski is undertaking an adventure in BPMN to demonstrate its shortcomings and to promote an alternative approach to descibing business processes.

... I will take simple scenarios drawn from everyday knowledge work and
show how BPMN cannot express these situations. I will also show how
easy they are to express in the Human Interaction Management notation ...

Unfortunately, he chooses to ignore the rules and semantics of BPMN (it is not just a set of Visio shapes) and so detracts from his argument. There are plenty of issues with using BPMN but a good starting point is to use what is there at BPMN 1.1 correctly. For clarity, I have reproduced the offending diagram below:

This diagram shows the following incorrect BPMN expressions

• Messages (dashed arrows) originating at gateways
• Messages between activities in a POOL (the saleperson, technical consultant amd account manager are LANES)
• Use of message as a sequence flow
• Loops

I think that the BPMN that expresses the ideas behind Keith's drawing is:

Note that the loops continue (perhaps indefinitely) while the proposal is not OK.

Keith asks a number of questions that purport to show that BPMN is inadequate for his purpose

What are the goals responsibilities of each player?

How can the salesperson know what the others are looking for?

etc

None of these questions are relevant to the business process and the purpose of BPMN. Overloading an expression of sequence, orchestration and choreography with specification of the activities, policies and human interactions will confuse rather than communicate. There are plenty of other modelling artifacts that can be employed in an enterprise architecture to complete the picture.

Modelling Timer Interrupt in BPMN

Modelling Timer Interrupt in BPMN

Real-life processes are often limited by time and exception paths are taken when "Time's Up". The rich notation of BPMN provides for this. The BPMN 1.1 specification provides an example from Voting operations.

The normal sequence flow and error flow from "Moderate E-mail Discussion" in this case are merged into the subsequent activities but it is easy to imagine circumstances where the subsequent activities were  not identical.

Modelling this in BPMN using Intalio immediately presents a problem because error flows are not permitted to go anywhere beyond the error handler activity which may be a Sub-Process. (This is a compliance issue in Intalio v BPMN 1.1 specification ).

A further issue is that, in Intalio, the timer itself does not interrupt the activity within the sub-process. That is when the timer event is triggered, the error flow is executed and  the activities within the subprocess continue.
This is counter-intuitive and inconsistent with the implementation of the intermediate error event so is probably a bug. The BPMN 1.1 specification (10.2.2) only requires the error flow to be started, there is no clear direction as to the operation of the normal sequence flow. As a workaround in Intalio, to interrupt the flow within a subprocess by a timer, a fault has to be raised in the error-flow. To avoid that fault stopping the whole process, it has to be trapped and handled within the process (at an outer scope or subprocess boundary). How do other BPMN products treat the timer?

An explicit example of this is shown below. If the timer expires for the sub-process timed exec then execution is halted by the error end event in the error flow handler. This error end event is processed by the error handler activity fault in the outer subprocess.

This example is available as a complete Intalio project on the community forum