BPMN2 feature coverage status and roadmap

[farrukh_najmi]

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.

Does the dev team have a wiki page to track how actviti supports the various BPMN2 spec features?
This would be a very valuable page to create as it will allow the dev team and community to track the progress towards spec compliance. Items from the list would be top level tasks with associated priority and people wanting certain features could offer proposals to implement that feature.

If such a wiki page does not exist then perhaps simply creating a stub page may be a start and allowing registered community members to contribute towards updating that page.

What do you think?

[tombaeyens]

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

[falko_menge]

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.

[farrukh_najmi]

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.

[sjoerges]

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!

[borisjan]

Me too 🙂

[bernd_ruecker]

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

[borisjan]

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.

[bernd_ruecker]

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