topic BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap in Alfresco Archive

BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

farrukh_najmi — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:14:16 GMT

Dear Dev Team,First thank you for a very fine project. I will send in a contribution agreement and hope to contribute starting with small patches.I am still learning BPMN2 spec and its various features and frequently wonder or look through code to see if a feature is supported in actviti or not. Doe

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

tombaeyens — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 12:43:11 GMT

Does the dev team have a wiki page to track how actviti supports the various BPMN2 spec features?

we document what we have covered in the userguide section bpmn
http://www.activiti.org/userguide/index.html#bpmn20

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

falko_menge — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 09:50:40 GMT

I also thought about creating such an overview as the user guide is too verbose for getting a quick summary on the conformance status.

The tables 2.3 and 2.4 on page 6 (PDF 36) of the BPMN 2.0 Specification, which define the elements and attributes that form the Common Executable Conformance Sub-Class, might be a good format, especially as that is our first target.

However, one has to be careful not to create a wrong impression with such an overview, because BPMN also contains some more esoteric features, which are rarely used in practice. Hence, there should be comments about why an element is not supported right know and if possible how a similar behavior can be achieved with features that are currently implemented.

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

farrukh_najmi — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:08:02 GMT

I also thought about creating such an overview as the user guide is too verbose for getting a quick summary on the conformance status.

The tables 2.3 and 2.4 on page 6 (PDF 36) of the BPMN 2.0 Specification, which define the elements and attributes that form the Common Executable Conformance Sub-Class, might be a good format, especially as that is our first target.

However, one has to be careful not to create a wrong impression with such an overview, because BPMN also contains some more esoteric features, which are rarely used in practice. Hence, there should be comments about why an element is not supported right know and if possible how a similar behavior can be achieved with features that are currently implemented.

+1 on Falko's suggestion to use conformance tables of the spec to track conformance to the spec in a dedicated wiki page and to have a column with any relevant explanations. Presently it is not easy to determine what is and is not implemented based only on the Users Guide.

This would be a huge help to the community and if dev team wishes could even be done by the community in a wiki page. I would be glad to help.

Thanks.

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

sjoerges — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:19:08 GMT

Sorry for reviving the old topic, but does this overview of Activiti's common executable conformance exist by now? I also would be highly interested in this!

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

borisjan — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:39:52 GMT

Me too 🙂

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

bernd_ruecker — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:54:12 GMT

Hey guys. We have this table in the user guide: https://app.camunda.com/confluence/display/foxUserGuide/BPMN+2.0+Coverage. It applies to Activiti as well.

We currently have a good coverage, roadmap says we want to add message boundary events and interrupting event sub processes. Maybe Signal Start events. Termination end events. We constantly discuss adhoc marker, but that is not yet sure (hint: we prioritize issues of fox customers ;-)). Did I forget anything important you might miss?

Does this help?

Cheers
Bernd

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

borisjan — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 09:02:25 GMT

Thanks!

Very nice to get a little insight into your future plans as well. From the table I can see that there is no support for BPMN Data Objects and thus their dependency implications for the flow execution defined by the standard. I guess that it has been a matter of priorities but to my organization that would really be the feature that could make us replace our current engine with Activiti.

Do you know if there are any plans with respect to Data Objects?..

Best Regards, Boris.

Re: BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

bernd_ruecker — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 09:28:28 GMT

Hi Boris.

Two answers for that:
1.) Currently it is not planed in the short run, as we use a map to store variables at runtime and do not declare them at all in the XML. This is not as BPMN 2.0 thinks about data but works extremely well in real life projects, so we don't see a huge need to change that.

Anyway, it is frequently discussed and in the long run I would like to improve the XML support within the engine, to allow for XPath as expression language and schema validation. Then we are heading exactly in this direction.

2.) I cannot say anything WHEN that will happen. But I can give you a broad hint: We adjust the roadmap to our fox enterprise subscription customers. So if that is an urgent or important matter we could discuss if this is something we do when closing a deal with your company/project 🙂 If that is interesting let me know via mail: bernd.ruecker at camunda.com.

Cheers
Bernd