Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Book Image

Business Process Management with JBoss jBPM

Overview of this book

JBoss jBPM is a free, open-source, business process management solution. It enables users to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services. A business process is a sequence of activities triggered by a certain input that results in a valuable output. Business Process Management is about analyzing those activities in a structured way and eventually supporting their execution with a workflow application. This allows for the following results: Better management visibility of their business: improved decision making Low cost of inputs: de-skilled labor requirements, less waste, standardized components Better outputs: consistent quality, more customer satisfaction Businesses have always tried to manage their processes, but software such as jBPM brings the methodology and management theory to practical life. JBoss jBPM offers the following key features: Graphical process definition Flexibility to integrate code into the graphical process definition A customizable web-based workflow application that runs the process you’ve defined Easy programming model to extend the graphical process definition A process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of process definition languages and Java. Easy to integrate with other systems through the JBoss middleware suite.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Iterate the system


At the end of each testing period, we need to step back and assess our progress. Are the issues that are being raised related to the underlying process or to the web console user interface? The two types of issues would probably be worked on by different parts of the application team, so it would be good to make responsibility for each issue clear in the list.

It is also worthwhile looking at the results on a fundamental level: are the issues that are coming up ones that can be fixed, or is jBPM simply not the right kind of solution for our problem? We should not feel bad if indeed, we do have to reject jBPM, as there is no point flogging a dead horse, and sometimes, it is better to admit defeat than carry on regardless.

Process changes

By now you should be pretty comfortable with making changes to the process definition and redeploying. It should simply be a case of making the change to the process map, generating any task forms that might be needed, and deploying the...