Today at the BPMN 2011 workshop in Luzern, Bruce Silver gave an interesting talk on the status of BPMN 2.0, its adoption, and his proposal for improving its general usage.
I really appreciated the talk because:
- it focused on the ambiguities of the BPMN notation, even in the so acclaimed 2.0 version
- it highlighted how users tend to be confused once the notation is so complex.
Bruce presented his well-known approach, with the caveat that probably method and style is too weak as a position, so he proposes to move to the rules term, so that people feel somehow more obliged to comply 🙂 .
The first issue I take away is the problem of interoperability.
I would also identify a trend on what I heard here, through a parallel to what is happening in OMG within the Canonical XMI initiative (read something here), performed by the Canonical XMI Finalization Task Force: given a modeling language (or an exchange format like XMI) which is under-specified, too general, or too open for dialects generation, the need arises for putting some stricter limitations to the designers, for making the tools more interoperable and for improving the quality of the models. Interoperability is the explicit aim of XMI, but, since it failed to an extent. Probably the same would apply to XPDL itself: it was designed as an interchange format for business process models, but then ended up being prone to several dialects and interpretations as well. For XMI, the improved interoperability aim is now in charge of Canonical XMI (while no action is being taken on XPDL). The same purpose is addressed by the BPMN-I initiative by Bruce Silver.
A similar problem that has been addressed is executability:
Also on this, I see strong parallelism with the UML world. There is definitely a push towards executability of models: just think about the executable UML fUML and Alf initiatives (you can find a nice overview on both on Jordi’s blog here), at OMG or also some new activities like MiUML, an open-source executable UML project.
On the other side, also BPMN 2.0 is addressing executability and within WebRatio we are also providing somehow a pragmatic approach to BPMN executability, by generating running Web applications. The question is: are customers asking for that? The claim by Bruce is that they are not for BPMN. Most people only want to model, not to execute. Probably, if you look at the share of interested people, for UML it’s the same. However, I think executability is an interesting property that should be granted to give a general grounding to reality to models (although I acknowledge that some models may not need/allow that).
A final take from the day is related to choreography.
Interestingly enough, again people are not using it: neither in the BPMN world nor in the UML one. I don’t have stats on the usage of the different kinds of UML models, but I’m pretty sure people only use class diagrams basically. Some will use activity diagrams, and few sequence diagrams. Anything else?
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| Bruce Silver, with Bruce Silver Associates, presenting his keynote at the BPMN 2011 workshop. |
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Thanks Marco. What I meant to say is that presenting method and style as “best practices” is less effective than presenting it as rules that are validated in a tool.
–Bruce Silver
Bruce, thanks for your comment. Yes, I was actually joking about it in my post, but I completely agree with you.
I would even push it further and say that maybe some of your rules for BPMN could play the role that canonical XMI is playing for XMI. Does it make sense to think about them in terms of a potential standard that puts some limits in the modeling flexibility?