Practical Process Automation

Chapter 3. Developing Process Solutions

This chapter:

• Introduces Business Process Model and Notation as an executable process modeling language

• Explains how to execute process models and how to combine process models with programming code

• Explores important aspects of developing your own process solutions

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)

After jumping right into an executable process in the last chapter, let’s take a step back and explore some of the things you just saw in more detail. We’ll start with the process modeling language, which allows you to design a blueprint of your process that can be executed on a workflow engine. Such a language can express a sequence of tasks and all the nuts and bolts around it, like decision points, parallel tasks, and synchronization points.

Different tools might use different process modeling languages. For this book I will use BPMN, for two main reasons: it’s an adopted standard, and it’s great. I will elaborate on why it’s so great in “Process Modeling Languages”, but I first need to explain the basics.

Note

Not all process models need to be executed on an engine, of course; sometimes you may simply want to draw a picture to understand or document certain behavior. While this is a valid use case, it is not the focus of this book. Still, drawing business processes for discussion or documentation can help people in your organization understand the potential of process automation with a workflow engine. Make sure you use ...