Column 2

Intelligent Capture enables Digital Transformation at #ABBYYSummit16

I’ve been in beautiful San Diego for the past couple of days at the ABBYY Technology Summit, where I gave the keynote yesterday on why intelligent capture (including recognition technologies and content analytics) is a necessary onramp to digital transformation. I started my career in imaging and workflow over 25 years ago – what we would now call capture, ECM and BPM – and I’ve seen over and over again that if you don’t extract good data up front as quickly as possible, then you just can’t do a lot to transform those downstream processes. You can see my slides at Slideshare as usual:

ABBYY Technology Summit keynote from Sandy Kemsley

I’m finishing up a white paper for ABBYY on the same topic, and will post a link here when it’s up on their site. Here’s the introduction (although it will probably change slightly before final publication):

Data capture from paper or electronic documents is an essential step for most business processes, and often is the initiator for customer-facing business processes. Capture has traditionally required human effort – data entry workers transcribing information from paper documents, or copying and pasting text from electronic documents – to expose information for downstream processing. These manual capture methods are inefficient and error-prone, but more importantly, they hinder customer engagement and self-service by placing an unnecessary barrier between customers and the processes that serve them.

Intelligent capture – including recognition, document classification, data extraction and text analytics – replaces manual capture with fully-automated conversion of documents to business-ready data. This streamlines the essential link between customers and your business, enhancing the customer journey and enabling digital transformation of customer-facing processes.

I chilled out a bit after my presentation, then decided to attend one presentation that looked really interesting. It was, but was an advance preview of a product that’s embargoed until it comes out next year, so you’ll have to wait for my comments on it. Winking smile

A well-run event with a lot of interesting content, attended primarily by partners who build solutions based on ABBYY products, as well as many of ABBYY’s team from Russia (where a significant amount of their development is done) and other locations. It’s nice to attend a 200-person conference for a change, where – just like Cheers – everybody knows your name.

Keynoting at @ABBYY_USA Technology Summit

I’ve been in the BPM field since long before it was called BPM, starting with imaging and workflow projects back in the early 1990s. Although my main focus is on process now (hence the name of my blog), almost every project that I’m involved in has some element of content and capture, although not necessarily from paper documents. Basically, content capture is the onramp to many business processes: either the capture of a piece of content is what triggers a process (e.g., an application form) or it adds information to a process to move it along. Capture can mean traditional document scanning with intelligent recognition in the form of OCR, ICR, barcode and mark sense recognition, or can also be capture of information already in electronic form but not in a structured format (e.g., emails).

To get to the point, this is why I’m excited to be keynoting at the ABBYY Technology Summit coming up on November 16-18, in a presentation entitled How Digital Transformation is Increasing the Value of Capture and Text Analytics:

As the business world has been wrestling with the challenge of Digital transformation, the last few years have seen the shift away from BPM and Case Management technology platforms towards the more solutions-orientated approach offered by Smart Process Applications and Case Management Frameworks. A critical component of these business solutions is capability to capture the key business information at the point of origin.

This information is often buried inside forms and other business documents. Capturing this data through recognition technologies and automatic document classification transforms streams of documents of any structure and complexity into business-ready data.

This enables organizations of any size to streamline their existing business processes, increasing efficiency and reducing costs; it also enables real-time customer self-service processes triggered by mobile document capture.

I’ll be covering trends and benefits of intelligent capture, providing ABBYY’s customers and partners in attendance with solid advice on how to best start integrating these technologies to make their business processes run better. I’m also writing a paper covering these topics, sponsored by ABBYY, which will be available in time for the conference.

If you’re at the conference, please stop by and say hi, I’ll be hanging out there for the rest of the day after my keynote.

Strategy to execution – and back: it’s all about alignment

I recently wrote a paper sponsored by Software AG called Strategy To Execution – And Back, which you can find here (registration required). From the introduction:

When planning for business success, corporate management sets business strategy and specifies goals in terms of critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs). Although senior management is not concerned with the technical details of how business operations are implemented, they must have confidence that the operations are aligned with the strategy, and be able to monitor performance relative to the goals in real time.

In order to achieve operational alignment, there must be a clear path that maps strategy to execution: a direct link from the strategic goals in the high-level business model, through IT development and management practices, to the systems, activities and roles that make the business work. However, that’s only half the story: there must also be a path back from execution to strategy, allowing operational performance to be measured against the objectives in order to guide future strategy. Without both directions of traceability, there’s a disconnect between strategy and operations that can allow a business to drift off course without any indication until it’s far too late.

I cover how you need to have links from your corporate strategy through various levels of architecture to implementation, then be able to capture the operational metrics from running processes and roll those up relative to the corporate goals. If you don’t do that, then your operations could just be merrily going along their own path rather than working towards corporate objectives.

Another rift in the open source BPM market: @FlowableBPM forks from @Alfresco Activiti

In early 2013, Camunda – at the time, a value-added Activiti consulting partner as well as a significant contributor to the open source project – created a fork from Activiti to form what is now the Camunda open source BPM platform as well as their commercial version based on the open source core. As I wrote at the time:

At the end of 2012, I had a few hints that things at Alfresco’s Activiti BPM group was undergoing some amount of transition: Tom Baeyens, the original architect and developer of Activiti (now CEO of the Effektif cloud BPM startup announced last week), was no longer leading the Activiti project and had decided to leave Alfresco after less than three years; and camunda, one of the biggest Activiti contributors (besides Alfresco) as well as a major implementation consulting partner, was making noises that Activiti might be too tightly tied to Alfresco’s requirements for document-centric workflow rather than the more general BPM platform that Activiti started as.

Since then, Effektif became Signavio Workflow and Camunda decided to use a capital letter in their name; what didn’t change, however, is that as the main sponsor of Activiti, Alfresco obviously has a need to make Activiti work for document-centric BPM and skewed the product in that direction. That’s not bad if you’re an Alfresco ECM customer, but likely was not the direction that the original Activiti BPM team wanted to go.

Last month, I heard that key Activiti people had left Alfresco but had no word about where they were heading; last week, former Activiti project lead Tijs Rademakers and Activiti co-founder and core developer Joram Barrez announced that they were creating an Activiti fork to form Flowable with a team including former Alfresco Activiti people and other contributors.

To be clear to those who don’t dabble in open source, forking is a completely normal activity (no pun intended…well, maybe only a little) wherein a copy of the source code is take at a point in time to create a new open source project with its own name and developer community. This may be done because of a disagreement in product direction – as appears was the case here – or because someone wants to take it in a radically different direction to address a different need or market.

I heard about all of this from Jeff Potts, who has been involved in the Alfresco open source community for a decade, via his blog. He wrote about the Activiti leads leaving Alfresco back in September, although he reported it as three people leaving independently that just happened to occur at the same time. Possibly not completely accurate, in hindsight, but that was the word at the time. He then saw the Flowable announcement (linked above) and wrote about that, which is where I first saw it. Potts has been involved in the Alfresco open source community for a decade.

Alfresco’s founder and CTO, John Newton, posted about the team departure and the fork:

Unfortunately, some of my early friends on the Activiti project have disagreed with our direction and have taken the step of forking the Activiti code. This is disappointing because the work that they have done is very good and has generally been in the spirit of open source. However, the one thing that we could not continue to give them was exclusive control of the project. I truly wish that we could have found a way to work with them within a community framework.

This seemed to confirm my suspicion that this was a disagreement in product direction as well as a philosophical divide; with Alfresco now a much bigger company than it was at the time that they took Activiti under their wing, it’s not surprising that the corporate mindset wouldn’t always agree with open source direction. Having to spend much more effort on the enterprise edition than the open source project and seeing BPM subsumed under ECM would not sit well with the original Activiti BPM team.

Newton’s comments are also an interesting echo of Barrez’ post at the time of the Camunda fork. In both situations, a sense of disappointment – and maybe a bit of betrayal? – although now Barrez is on the other side of the equation.

Flowable was quick to offer a guide on how to move from Activiti to Flowable – trivial at this point since the code base is still the same – and Camunda jumped in with a guide on moving from Activiti to Camunda, an update on what they’ve done to the engine since their fork in 2013, and reasons why you should make the switch.

If you’re using Activiti right now, you have to be a bit nervous about this news, but don’t be.

If you’re using it primarily for document workflow with your Alfresco ECM, you’re probably best to stay put in the long run: undoubtedly, Activiti will be restaffed with a good team and will continue to integrate tightly with Alfresco; it’s possible that some of the capabilities might find their way from the Activiti project to the Alfresco project over time. There’s obviously going to be a bit of a gap in the team for a while: the project shows no new commits for a month, and questions on the forum are going unanswered.
If you use Activiti without Alfresco ECM (or with very little of it), you still don’t need to do anything right now: as Camunda showed in their post, a migration path from Activiti to Flowable or Camunda or any other fork will still exist in the future because of the shared heritage. It will get more complex over time, but not impossible. Sit tight for 6-12 months, and reassess your options then.
If you’re considering Activiti as a new installation, consider your use cases. If you’re a heavy Alfresco ECM user and want it tightly integrated, Activiti is the way to go. For other cases, it’s not so clear. We need to hear a bit more from Alfresco on their plans, but it’s telling that Newton’s post said “Business Process Management is one of those critical components of any content management system” which seems to place ECM as the primary focus and BPM as a component. He also said that they would be more explicit in their roadmap, and I recommend that you wait for that if you’re in the evaluation stage for a pure (non-ECM) BPM platform.

In the meantime, Flowable has released their initial 5.22.0 engine, and have plans for version 6 by the end of November. They haven’t published a product roadmap yet, but I’m expecting significant diversions from Activiti to happen quickly to incorporate new technologies that bring the focus back to BPM.

Note: the photo accompanying this post was taken by my talented photographer friend, Pat Anderson, with whom I have eaten many delicious and photogenic meals.

Bridging the bimodal IT divide

I wrote a paper a few months back on bimodal IT: a somewhat controversial subject, since many feel that IT should not be bimodal. My position is that it already is – with a division between “heavy” IT development and lighter-weight citizen development – and we need to deal with what’s there with a range of development environments including low-code BPMS. From the opening section of the paper:

The concept of bimodal IT – having two different application development streams with different techniques and goals – isn’t new. Many organizations have development groups that are not part of the standard IT development structure, including developers embedded within business units creating applications that IT couldn’t deliver quickly enough, and skunkworks development groups prototyping new ideas.

In many cases, this split didn’t occur by design, but out of situational necessity when mainstream IT development groups were unable to service the needs of the business, especially transformational business units created specifically to drive innovation. However, in the past few years, analysts are positioning this split as a strategic action to boost innovation. By 2013, McKinsey & Company was proposing “greenfield IT” – technology managed independently of the legacy application development and infrastructure projects that typically consume most of the CIO’s attention and budget – as a way to innovate more effectively. They found a correlation between innovation and corporate growth, and greenfield IT as a way to achieve that innovation. By the end of 2014, the term “bimodal IT” was becoming popular, with Mode 1 being the traditional application development cycle focused on stability, well suited to infrastructure and legacy maintenance and Mode 2, focused on agility and innovation, similar to McKinsey’s greenfield IT.

Read on by downloading the paper from Software AG’s site; right now, it looks like registration isn’t required.

AIIM Toronto seminar: FNF Canada’s data capture success

Following John Mancini’s keynote, we heard from two of the sponsors, SourceHOV and ABBYY. Pam Davis of SourceHOV spoke about EIM/ECM market trends, based primarily on analyst reports and surveys, before giving an overview of their BoxOffice product.

ABBYY chose to give their speaking slot to a customer, Anjum Iqbal of FNF Canada, who spoke about their capture and ECM projects. FNF provides services to financial institutions in a variety of lending areas, and deals with a lot of faxed documents. A new business line would have their volume move to 4,500 inbound faxes daily, mostly time-sensitive documents, such as mortgage or loan closing, that need to be processed within an hour of receipt. To do this manually, they would have needed to increase their 4 full time staff to 10 people handle the inbound workflow even at a rate of 1 document/minute; instead, they used ABBYY FlexiCapture to build a capture solution for the faxes that would extract the data using OCR, and interface with their downstream content and workflow systems without human intervention. The presentation went by pretty quickly, but we learned that they had a 3-month implementation time.

I stayed on for the roundtable that ABBYY hosted, with Iqbal giving more details on their implementation. They reached a tipping point when the volume of inbound printed faxes just couldn’t be handled manually, particularly when they added some new business lines that would increase their volume significantly. Unfortunately, the processes involving the banks were stuck on fax technology — that is, the banks refused to move to electronic transfer rather than faxes — so they needed to work with that fixed constraint. They needed quality data with near-zero error rates extracted from the faxes, and selected ABBYY and one of their partners to help build a solution that took advantage of standard form formats and 100% machine printing on the forms (rather than handwriting). The forms weren’t strictly fixed format, in that some critical information such as mortgage rates may be in different places on the document depending on the other content of the form; this requires a more intelligent document classification as well as content analytics to extract the information. They have more than 40 templates that cover all of their use cases, although still need to have one person in the process to manage any exceptions where the recognition certainty was below a certain percentage. Given the generally poor quality of faxed documents, undoubtedly this capture process could also handle documents scanned on a standard business scanner or even a mobile device in addition to their current RightFax server. Once the data is captured, it’s formatted as XML, which their internal development team then used to integrate with the downstream processes, while the original faxes are stored in a content management system.

Given that these processes accept mortgage/loan application forms and produce the loan documents and other related documentation, this entire business seems ripe for disruption, although given the glacial pace of technology adoption in Canadian financial services, this could be some time off. With the flexible handling of inbound documents that they’ve created, FNF Canada will be ready for it when it happens.

That’s it for me at the AIIM Toronto seminar; I had to duck out early and missed the two other short sponsor presentations by SystemWare and Lexmark/Kofax, as well as lunch and the closing keynote. Definitely worth catching up with some of the local people in the industry as well as hearing the customer case studies.

AIIM Toronto keynote with @jmancini77

I’m at the AIIM Toronto seminar today — I pretty much attend anything that is in my backyard and looks interesting — and John Mancini of AIIM is opening the day with a talk on business processes. Yes, Mr. Column 1 is talking about Column 2, if you get the Zachman reference. This is actually pretty significant: content management isn’t just about content, just as process management isn’t just about process, but both need to overlap and work together. I had a call with Mancini yesterday in advance of my keynote at ABBYY’s conference next month, and we spent 30 minutes talking about how disruption in capture technologies has changed all business processes. Today, in his keynote, he talked about disruptive business processes that have transformed many industries.

He gave us a look at people, process and technology against the rise (and sometimes fall) of different technology platforms: document management and workflow; enterprise content management; mobile and cloud. There are a lot of issues as we move from one type of platform to another: moving to a cloud SaaS offering, for example, drives the move from perimeter-based security to asset-based security. He showed a case study for financial processes within organizations — such as accounts payable and receivable — with both a tactical dimention of getting things done and a strategic side of building a bridge to digital transformation. Most businesses (especially traditional ones) operate at a slim profit margin, making it necessary to look at ways to reduce costs: not through small, incremental improvements, but through more transformational means. For financial processes, in many cases this means getting rid of manual data capture and manipulation: no more manual data entry, no more analysis via spreadsheets. And cost reduction isn’t the key driver behind transforming financial business processes any more: it’s the need for better business analytics. Done right, these analytics provide real-time insight into your business that provide a strategic competitive differentiator: the ability to predict and react to changing business conditions.

Mancini finished by allowing today’s sponsors, with booths around the room, to introduce themselves: Precision Content, AIIM, Box, Panasonic, SystemWare, ABBYY, SourceHOV, and Lexmark (Kofax). I’ll be here for the rest of the morning, and look forward to hearing from some of the sponsors and their customers here today.

Case management in insurance

I recently wrote a paper on how case management technology can be used in insurance claims processing, sponsored by DST (but not about their products specifically). From the paper overview:

Claims processing is a core business capability within every insurance company, yet it is
often one of the most inefficient and risky processes. From the initial communication that
launches the claim to the final resolution, the end-to-end claims process is complex and
strictly regulated, requiring highly-skilled claims examiners to perform many of the
activities to adjudicate the claim.

Managing a manual, paper-intensive claims processing operation is a delicate balance
between risk and efficiency, with most organizations choosing to decrease risk at the cost
of lower operational efficiency. For example, skilled examiners may perform rote tasks to
avoid the risk of handing off work to less-experienced colleagues; or manual tracking and
logging of claims activities may have to be done by each worker to ensure a proper audit
trail.

A Dynamic Case Management (DCM) system provides an integrated and automated
claims processing environment that can improve claim resolution time and customer
satisfaction, while improving compliance and efficiency.

You can download it from DST’s site (registration required).

Camunda Community Day: @CamundaBPM technical sessions

I’m a few weeks late completing my report on the Camunda Community Day. The first part was on the community contributions and sessions, while the second half documented here is about Camunda showing new things that could be used by the community developers in the audience.

First up was Vladimirs Katusenoks, core developer on BPMN.io, with a presentation on bpmn-js: how it works, and how to extend it with custom functionality such as adding color to BPMN diagrams, which is a permitted extension to BPMN XML. His live coding presentation showed changing the colour of a shape background, either statically in code for the element class or by adding a colour picker to an individual element context palette; this was based on the bpmn-js core BPMN functionality, using bpmn-moddle to read/write into the metamodel and diagram-js to render it. There are a number of other bpmn-js examples on Github.

Next, Felix Müller discussed KPI management, expanding on his August blog post on the topic. KPI management is based on quantitative indicators for process cycle-time improvement, including cycle time and overdue time, plus definitions of the time period, unit of measure and calculation method. In Camunda, KPIs are defined in the Modeler, then monitored in Cockpit. He showed how to use the concept of element templates (that extend core definitions) to create custom fields on collaboration object (process) or individual tasks, e.g., KPI unit (hours, days, minutes) and KPI threshold (number). In Cockpit, this appears as a new tab for KPI Overview, showing a list of individual instances and target/current/average duration, plus an indicator of overdue status of the instance and any contained tasks; there is also a decorator bubble on the top right of the task on the process model to show the number of overdue instances on the aggregate model, or overdue status as a check mark or exclamation on individual models. The Cockpit modifications were done by creating a plug-in to display KPI statistics, which queries and calculates on the fly – a potential performance problem that might be improved through pre-aggregation of statistics. He also demonstrated how to modify this basic KPI model to include an expected duration as well as maximum duration. A good start, although I think there’s a lot more that’s needed here.

Thorsen Lindhauer, a Camunda core BPM developer, discussed how to contribute to the Camunda open source community, both at camunda.org (engine and desktop modeler, same as the commercial product) and bpmn.io (JS tools). Possible contributions include answering questions on forums; logging error reports; documenting ideas for new functionality; and working on code. Code contributions typically start by having a forum discussion about planned new functionality, then a decision is made on whether it will be core code (higher quality standards since it will become part of the commercial product, and will eventually be maintained by Camunda) versus a community extension; this is followed by ongoing development, merge and release cycles. Camunda is very supportive of community contributions, even if they don’t become part of the core product: community involvement is critical to the health of any open source project.

The last presentation of the community day was Daniel Meyer discussing the product roadmap. The next release, 7.6, will be on November 30 – they have a strict twice-yearly release cycle. This release includes updates to DMN, CMMN, BPMN, rolling updates, Cockpit features, and UI/UX in web apps; I have captured a few notes here but see the linked roadmap for a more complete and accurate description and the online documentation as it is rolled out.

DMN:

Simpler decision table editing with drop-down lists of comparison/range operators instead of having to remember FEEL or Juel syntax
Ability to add list of selection values (advanced mode still exists for full flexibility)
Decisions with literal expressions
DMN engine performance 4-6x faster
Support for decision requirements diagrams/graphs (DRD/DRG) that can link decision tables; visualization in Modeler and Cockpit are not there yet but the structures are supported – in my experience, this is typical of Camunda, which builds and releases the engine capabilities early then follows with the visualization, allowing for a quicker start for executable diagrams

CMMN:

Modeler now completely models CMMN including technical attributes such as listeners
Cockpit (visualization still incomplete although we saw a brief view) will allow linking models of same or different types
Engine feature and functionality improvements

Rolling updates allow Camunda process engine to be updated without shutdown: guaranteed backwards compatibility of database schema to allow database to be updated first, then roll updates of engines by taking each offline individually and allowing load balancer to reroute sessions.
BPMN:

BPMN conditional event supported
Improved modeling including labels, collapsing/expanding subprocesses to switch between view types, and field injections in property panel.

Cockpit:

More flexible/granular human task monitoring
New welcome page with links to apps (Cockpit, Tasklist, Admin), user profile, and frequent links
Batch operations (cancel, suspend, etc.) based on batch action capability built for instance migration
CMMN and DMN DRD visualization

Daniel discussed some other minor improvements based on customer feedback, plus plans for 2017, including a web modeler for collaborative BPMN, CMMN and DMN modeling via a SaaS offering and a future on-premise version. They finished the day with a poll and community feedback to establish priorities for future versions.

I stayed on for the second day, which is actually a separate conference: BPMCon for Camunda’s enterprise (commercial) customers. Rather, I stayed on for Neil Ward-Dutton’s keynote, then ducked out for most of the rest of day, which was in German. Neil’s keynote included results from workshops that he has done with executives on digital transformation, and how BPM can be used to create the bridges between the diverse parts of a digital business (internal to external, automated to people-centric), while tracking and coordinating the work that flows between the different areas.

Disclaimer: Camunda paid my travel expenses to attend both conference days. I was not compensated in any way for attending or for writing this post, and the opinions here are my own.

Camunda Community Day: community contributions

Two years ago, I attended Camunda’s open source community day, and gave the opening keynote at their enterprise user conference the following day. I really enjoyed my experience at the open source day, and jumped at the chance to attend again this year – and to visit Berlin.

The first day was the community day, where users of Camunda’s open source software version (primarily developers) talk about what they’re doing with it, plus some of the contributions that the community is making to the project and updates from Camunda on new features on the horizon. To break this up a bit – since I’m already a week after the conference and want to get something out there – I’ll cover the community sessions in this post, then the Camunda technical sessions and a bit about the enterprise conference in a later post.

The first presentation was by Oliver Hock of Videa Project Services, demonstrating robot control using a LEGO Mindstorms robot to solve a Rubix cube. He showed how they used BPMN to define movements and decision tables to determine the move logic, then automated the solution using Camunda BPM. Although you may never want to build a robot to solve a Rubix cube, there are a lot of other devices out there that, like the Mindstorms robot, are controlled via Java APIs; Hock’s design showed how these Java-enabled devices can make use of higher-level modeling constructs such as BPMN and decision tables.

Next up was Jan Galinski of Holisticon to show the Spring Boot community code extension – an example of how the community of Camunda open source users give back to the open source project for everyone’s benefit. Spring Boot is a microservices framework allowing for fast deployment of web applications with a minimal amount of overhead; the Spring Boot starter extension to Camunda allows for using Camunda without a Java application server to essentially provide Camunda apps as microservices. The extension, consisting of about 5,000 lines of code, has been developed over two years with 10 contributors, including both community and Camunda contributors. Galinski showed a live coding demo of replacing JBoss server with Spring Boot starter in a Camunda application to show how this works; he has also written a post on the Camunda community site on the 1.3.0 version of Camunda BPM Spring Boot for more technical details. Although granualar process apps such as this are easier from a devops perspective in terms of deployment and scalability, the challenge is that there is no single point of entry for an end user to look at a worklist (for example). We saw some methods for dealing with this, where a workload service collects information from individual process services with the help of the Camunda BPM Reactor plugin and aggregates them; a federated task list is under development to bring together tasks from multiple process servers into a single list, with a simple completion form. Galinski walked through the general architecture for this, and noted that they are working on making this an official extension. Update: Jan Galinski pointed out in the comments that it was Simon Zambrovski (also of Holisticon) who did the portion on the presentation on cloud, universal tasklist and event processing — I missed the transition and his name in my hasty note-taking.

Jarl Friis of the Danish tax authority (SKAT) presented their use of the Camunda decision engine: they are using only decision services, and not the BPM capabilities, which likely makes them unusual as a Camunda customer. There are a couple of applications for them: first is to raise data quality in financial reporting to the IRS (for FATCA requirements), where they receive data from Danish financial institutions and have to process it into a specific XML format to send to the IRS. Although many of the data cleansing and transformation rules are in the XML schema definitions, some are not amenable to that format and are being defined in DMN decision tables instead. As this has rolled out, they see that decision tables give them an easier way to respond to annual rule changes, although their business people are not yet trained to make changes to the decision tables. That has resulted in developers having to make the decision table changes and test the results, which is one of the challenges that they have had to deal with: some of the developer test frameworks replicated the original decision table logic in code, which effectively tested the decision table implementation rather than the business logic. That test framework, of course, no longer worked when the decision table was changed, and Friis’ message to the audience was that organizations have to deal with challenges of ownership and responsibility for rules as well as rules testing.

Niall Deehan of Camunda gave a great presentation on on modeling anti-patterns: snaking models that are often used to fit models onto a single sheet of paper (instead, use model with happy path down the centre from left to right); inappropriate use of BPMN versus CMMN (e.g., voting scenarios); inappropriate use of BPMN versus process engine or Cockpit capabilities (e.g., service call with error exceptions for null pointer, bad response, service down); too many listeners on tasks (masks problems and pushes process logic into code, based on concept that analysts’ model should not be changed). He discussed some best practices for consistency: define the symbol set to be used by your analysts and lock down the modeler to remove elements that you don’t want people using; create and maintain your own best practices documentation; use model templates for commonly used activities; and proper training. I would love to see his presentation captured for replay: it was engaging and informative.

The last community presentation was Martin Schimak of plexiti, showing three community extensions used for automating testing of BPMN and CMMN models. Assert checks and sets the status of tasks in order to drive a process instance through a test scenario. Process Test Coverage visualizes test process paths and checks process model coverage ratio, as covered by individual test methods and entire test classes (e.g., using mockito). Assert Scenario is for writing robust test suites for process models; this was not covered in Schimak’s demo due to time contraints, but you can read more about it on his blog.

Before we started on the Camunda technical presentations, the community award was presented by Camunda as a reward for contributions on extensions: this went to Jan Galinski from Holisticon. It’s really encouraging to see the level of engagement between Camunda and their open source community: Camunda obviously realizes that the community is an important contributor to the success of the enterprise version of the software and the company altogether, and treats them as trusted partners.

Disclaimer: Camunda paid my travel expenses to attend both conference days. I was not compensated in any way for attending or for writing this post, and the opinions here are my own.