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)

Business process documentation


With the hurly burly of the development phase out of the way, there is now more time to devote to "nice to have" features of our BPM system. One of these features that we might like to develop further is our online process documentation for our users. Why would we want to do this? Well, an intuitive system is one thing, but the reality of naive users is quite another. In truth, a user community is much more likely to fully adopt a new system if users have crystal clear documentation talking them through what they have to do and why they have to do it. Ideally, this documentation should be available from go-live, if not before to coincide with training, but in the real world this is unlikely to get the resources it needs.

Good quality business process documentation pays for itself. It provides the basis of training materials, which would otherwise be dry and hard to understand without a process context. This means that new hires can be brought in much more...