bpmNEXT 2018: Last session with a Red Hat demo, Serco presentation and DMN TCK review
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
We’re on the final session of bpmNEXT 2018 — it’s been an amazing three days with great demos and wonderful conversations.
Exploiting Cloud Infrastructure for Efficient Business Process Execution, Red Hat
Kris Verlaenen, project lead for jBPM as part of Red Hat, presented on cloud BPM infrastructure, specifically for execution and monitoring. Cloud makes BPM lightweight, scalable, embedable and able to take advantage of the larger cloud app ecosystem. They are introducing some new cloud infrastructure, including a controller for managing server deployments, a smart router for delegating and aggregating requests from applications to servers, and monitoring that aggregates process statistics across servers and containers. The demo showed using Red Hat’s OpenShift container application platform (actually MiniShift running on his laptop) to create a new environment and deploy an IT hardware ordering BPM application. He walked through using the application to create a new order and see the milestone-based monitoring of the order, then the hardware provider’s view of their steps in the process to provide information and advance the process to the next stage. The process engine and monitoring engine can be deployed in different containers on different hardware, in any combination of cloud providers and on-premise infrastructure. Applications and servers can be bundled into a single immutable image for easy provisioning — more of a microservices style — or can be deployed independently. Multiple versions of the same application can be deployed, allowing current instances to play out in the original version while new instances use the most recent version, or other strategies that would allow new instances of any version to be created, while monitoring can aggregate instance data from all versions in all containers.
Kris is also live-blogging the conference, check out his posts. He has gone back and included the video of each presentation when they are released (something that I didn’t do for page load performance reasons) as well as providing his commentary on each presentation.
Dynamic Work Assignment, Serco
Lloyd Dugan of Serco has the unenviable position of being the last presenter of the conference, although he gave a presentation of dynamic work assignment implementation rather than an actual demo (with a quick view of the simple process model in the Trisotech animator near the end, plus an animation of the work assignment in action). His company is a call center business process outsourcer, where knowledge workers use a case management application implemented in BPMN, driven by events such as inbound calls and documents, as well as timers. Real-time work prioritization and assignment is necessary because of SLAs around inbound calls, and the task management model is moving from work being selected (and potentially cherry-picked) by workers, to push assignments. Tasks are scored and assigned using decision models that include task type and SLAs, and worker eligibility based on each individual’s skills and training. Although work assignment products exist, this one is specifically for the complex rules around the US Affordable Care Act administration, which requires a combination of decision tables, database table-driven rules, and lower-level coding to provide the right combination of flexibility and performance.
DMN TCK (Technical Compatibility Kit) Working Group
Keith Swenson of Fujitsu (but presenting here in his role on the DMN standards) started on the idea of a set of standardized DMN technical compatibility tests based on conversations at bpmNEXT in 2016, and he presented today on where they’re at with the TCK. Basically, the TCK provides a way for DMN vendors to demonstrate their compliance with the standard by providing a set of DMN models, input data, and expected results, testing decision tables, boxed expressions and FEEL. Vendors who can demonstrate that they pass all of the TCK tests are listed on a github site along with information about individual test results, providing a way for DMN customers to assess the compliance level of vendors. Keith wrote an update on this last September that provides a good summary up to that point, and in today’s presentation he walked through some of the additional things that they’ve done including identifying sections of the DMN specification that require clarifications or additions due to ambiguity that can lead to different implementations. DMN 1.2 is coming out this year, which will require a new set of tests specifically for that version while maintaining the previous version tests; they are also trying to improve testing of error cases and introducing more real-world decision models. If you create and use DMN models, or make a DMN-compliant decision management product, or you’re otherwise interested in the DMN TCK, you can find out here how to get involved in the working group.
That’s it for bpmNEXT 2018. There will be voting for the best in show and some wrapup after lunch, but we’re pretty much done for this year. Another amazing year that makes me proud to be a part of this community.
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