Business processes express the way an organization works toward a well-defined business goal. Both humans and systems play important roles in reaching this goal. We need an understanding of interactions between people and an organization's business processes and how responsibilities are assigned and managed for different human interactions involved in those processes.
This chapter will focus on understanding the framework provided by the BPM discipline—and the jBPM6 framework—to handle human interactions. We will also introduce the Web Service Human Task (WS-HT) standard specification that has been created to standardize the information, life cycle, and interaction with software components specialized in managing human interactions.
In this chapter, you will learn the following topics:
The role that human tasks play in the BPM discipline
How jBPM6 handles human interactions at the code level
User interfaces of KIE Workbench specialized in human interactions