The BPMN Model Interchange Working Group is all about (as you might guess from the name) interchanging BPMN models between different vendors’ products: something that OMG promised with the BPMN standard, but which never actually worked out of the box due to contradictions in the standard and misinterpretations by some vendors. To finish off Wednesday morning at bpmNEXT, we have a live demo involving 12 different tools with participants in different locations, with Denis Gagne of Trisotech (who chairs the working group) and Falko Menge of camunda (who heads up the test automation subgroup) on the stage, a few others here on the sidelines, some at the OMG meeting in Reston, and some in their offices in France and Poland.
To start, different lanes of the process were designed by four different people on IBM Blueworks Live, Activiti, camunda and W4; each then exported their process models and saved to Dropbox. Denis switched back and forth between the different screens (they were all on a Google Hangout) to show us what was happening as the proceeded, and we could see the notifications from Dropbox as the different files were added. In the second stage, Bonitasoft was used to augment the Blueworks Live model, itp-commerce edited the Activiti model, and Signavio edited the camunda model. In the third stage, ADONIS was used to merge together the lanes created in several of the models (I lost track of which ones) into a single process model, and Yaoqiang used to merge the Signavio and camunda models. Then, the Trisiotech Visio BPMN modeler was used to assemble the ADONIS and Yaoqiang models into the final model with multiple pools. At the end, the final model was imported into a number of different tools: the Trisotech web modeler, the Oracle BPM modeler, the bpmn.io environment from camunda, and directly into to the W4 execution engine (without passing through a modeling environment). Wow.
The files exchanged were BPMN XML files, and the only limitations of which tool to use when was that some only support a single pool so had to be used at the earlier stages where each tool was only modeling a single lane or pool. This is how BPMN was supposed to work, but the MIWG has found some number of inconsistencies with the standard and also some issues with the vendors’ tools that had to be corrected.
They have developed a number of test cases that cover the descriptive and analytic classes within BPMN, and automated tools to test the outcome of different vendors’ modelers. Over 20 BPMN modelers have been tested for import, export and roundtrip capabilities; if you’re a BPMS vendor supporting BPMN 2.0 (or claiming to), you should be on this list because there are a lot of us who just aren’t going to write our own XSLT to translate your models into something that can be read by another tool. If you’re a process designer using a BPMS, shame your vendor into participating because it creates a more flexible and inclusive environment for your design and modeling efforts.
This is hugely valuable work that they’re doing in the working group; note that you don’t have to be an OMG member to get involved, and the BPMN MIWG would love to have others join in to help make this work even better.
We’re off for lunch and a break now, then back for six more sessions this afternoon. Did I mention how awesome bpmNEXT is?