(very) long lasting processes

[heymjo]

Hi,

We have business processes implementing important legal procedures that can take more than a year (or several years) to complete. Say we start such process instance today using Activiti 5.5, and we need to upgrade to Activiti 7 in two years from now, in what way could this upgrade impact the running process instances ? Is it possible to assert the risks here ?

I'm thinking things like (in ascending order of disruptiveness)

1. api changes on the process engine services


2. deprecated / removed / changed extension points


3. changes in the database schema


4. changes in process execution semantics

Anything else ?

We can easily find out and fix 1/2/3 in a test environment, but 4/ will be harder to test against. I'm not asking for a binary-compatibility-guarantee here, just want to get an idea what we are looking at if we decide to implement Activiti for the long haul on this project.

Thanks,
Jorg

[ronald_van_kuij]

Regarding 4:

Activiti tries to implement the execution semantics of BPMN 2.0, but bugs might slip in and if you (by accident) (ab)use such a bug, you might have a problem. Besides that, I think that there still might be some issues but not more or less than with other engines.

[ronald_van_kuij]

Oh and if you made 'unit tests' for your processes, you can find issues regarding 4 as well in a test env.

[heymjo]

OK I conclude then that having a unit test exercising the full workflow path is crucial for projects of this nature. Not really different from the integration with any other library, as you say.

Thanks for your feedback !

Jorg

[ronald_van_kuij]

OK I conclude then that having a unit test exercising the full workflow path is crucial for projects of this nature. Not really different from the integration with any other library, as you say./quote]

Correct, only the 'execution' of things in the library are specified in xml now, not in java 🙂