Some questions about Activiti's future

[davidmartinho]

Hello there,

First of all, i must congratulate you guys for the excellent job you've made so far. Activiti definitively seems promising to the BPM world

I'm currently preparing my PhD thesis, which will mainly focus on how can Social Software empower BPM environments to achieve more fruitful approaches. It regards problems such as those inherent to the language gap existing between different business process stakeholders (modelers, experts, developers, executors) and, consequently, to their involvement within the same collaborative environment. Basically, those who execute business processes are not expected to know the meaning of BPMN 2.0 primitives and so on, nevertheless, their experience on executing the business is important and may find itself useful for the improvement of a business process.

I'm currently working on a system that aims to help in attacking that particular problem, and i'm considering using the Activiti environment for its implementation. For what i have understood from the Activiti Cycle component, it is quite different as the system i'm designing has more focus on the discussion system between all stakeholders and the evolution of the BPM efforts. Nevertheless, i would like to ask you first about some issues that might hold me back in this subject matter.

Question 1:
Will the Activiti Modeler support different model versions of the same business process model? Also, will it possible to create "branches" of the current deployed business process model "trunk" that may later be merged with the "trunk"?

Question 2:
Will the business process execution entities be traceable to their respective business process modeling entities? Regarding the previous question, will the granularity of that traceability allow to identify its version?
I.E.: Will i somehow have a relationship between an executed task and its respective activity model? And will that relationship tell me which version of the model was executed?

Question 3:
Will the Activiti Explorer allow to create deviations to the pre-defined flow codified in the business processes deployed?
I.E.: Allow one to create an alternative task, or add an additional data field to the data form?

Question 4:
Will the RESTful API that you provide to interact with the Activiti Engine allow all CRUD operations? From what i have seen until now, you seem to only support authentication and read (GET) operations.
I.E.: Will i be able to develop my own Activiti component?

I guess these are the insights i need for now. Thank you very much for your attention and your time.

Best regards,
David

[tombaeyens]

Question 1:
Will the Activiti Modeler support different model versions of the same business process model? Also, will it possible to create "branches" of the current deployed business process model "trunk" that may later be merged with the "trunk"?

Signavio definitely supports working with multiple versions.  To what extend the open source version will be able to work with multiple versions is still not clear.  You can just put the version in the file name as a simple solution.   But if you want the full collaboration features, consider buying the Signavio product.  That works as well with Activiti.

Question 2:
Will the business process execution entities be traceable to their respective business process modeling entities? Regarding the previous question, will the granularity of that traceability allow to identify its version?
I.E.: Will i somehow have a relationship between an executed task and its respective activity model? And will that relationship tell me which version of the model was executed?

Yes.  That is the target for Activiti Cycle.
There will be full traceability from the deployed process model version to the source process and to the requirements document.
Though that full scope might not be completely realized by Nov for the 5.0 release.

Question 3:
Will the Activiti Explorer allow to create deviations to the pre-defined flow codified in the business processes deployed?
I.E.: Allow one to create an alternative task, or add an additional data field to the data form?

You will be able to create sub tasks dynamically, assign those and associate data with the task or with those subtasks.

Question 4:
Will the RESTful API that you provide to interact with the Activiti Engine allow all CRUD operations? From what i have seen until now, you seem to only support authentication and read (GET) operations.
I.E.: Will i be able to develop my own Activiti component?

The REST API also will expose update operations.  For some parts like tasks, that will be basically CRUD operations.  For the runtime process data, CRUD is too low level to expose.