BPMN 2.0 Tutorial

About this tutorial

• Based on current BPMN 2.0 for UML reference implementation.
• Developed by Daniel Brookshier

What is BPMN ?

• Business Process Modeling Notation
• Developed by Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), and is currently maintained by the Object Management Group since the two organizations merged in 2005
• Supports business process management for technical and business users
• Bridge communication gap between business process design and implementation

What…?

• BPMN is simple
• Process diagrams business people like
• Less complex (business likes that too)
• Under the covers, technical enough for techies

What Does BPMN Not Do?

• State transitions
• Functional decomposition
• Organizational hierarchies
• Data modeling

What is BPMN Like?

• Similar to flowcharts and UML Activity diagrams
• Flow of activities with various messaging and data
• Can be used for service orchestration in SOA

Why BPMN?

• Standard notation
• Model concepts and/or implementation of
• business process
• Models high-level process concepts
• Notation is not complex

Issues With BPMN

• Limited complexity
• Process/conversation oriented
• Very high level
• Cannot see details of tasks or data

Solving BPMN Issues Via UML

• BPMN as an extension to UML
• Enhanced ability to implement complexity
• Link implementation with orchestration
• Greater tool support
• Fill in gaps with details state, decomposition, data, implementations

Executable Verses Non-executable

• Process flows can be executable or non executable
• Executable process follows specific rules
• Formal condition expressions are typically not included in non-executable form
• Executable does not have Manual, Abstract, and other non-execution elements

BPMN Diagram Zoo

• Process – Flow of activity, decisions, data and events
• Collaboration – Conversations and interactions (also process)
• Choreography – Tasks performed by participants and how participants coordinate interactions via messages.

BPMN Choreography

• Sequence of interactions between Participants.
• Choreographies exist outside of or in between Pools.
• A Choreography Task is an atomic Activity in a Choreography Process.
• The task represents an Interaction, which is one or two Message exchanges between two Participants.
• Helps to show who initiates the activity and the first message.

Activities

• Work that is performed within a Business Process.
• Activity can be atomic or non-atomic (compound)
• High-level, so does not describe the activity detail (not the job of BPMN)
• Three types: Task, Sub-process, and Transaction

What are Sub Processes?

• Is in the context of the process and can access the contextual data.
• Can be expanded or collapsed to show detail of the sub-process or to hide the detail.
• Sub process MUST define an internal process with a start and end event.
• A sub process is only reusable within the parent process (i.e. it is not reusable in the overall design).

Gateways

• Gateways are used to control how Sequence Flows interact as they converge and diverge within a Process.
• Capable of consuming or generating additional tokens.
• Define decisions/branching (exclusive, inclusive, and complex), merging, forking, and joining.

About Data Symbols

• Data Objects provide information about what Activities require and/or what they produce
• Represent a singular object or a collection of objects
• Data Input and Data Output provide the same information for Processes

(Read the BPMN lecture for the remaining content)