Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Bruce's comment on Process Variance

Vishal
glad you are posting on this topic, but I have some questions. On first one "inheritance", I don't understand how your item differs from embedded and reusable subprocess (renamed call activity) in the current spec. Are you proposing new semantics, new notation, or new level of mandatory support?
Answer / Clarification:
Bruce - my idea is whether processes can inherit properties from parent process. e.g. parent process may say credit check and approve loan. The child process will go into details of credit check, elaboratre the steps involved and then move to a set of steps required to execute approve loan.

The same question applies to the process variance feature, what some BPMSs call "dynamic subprocess." Do you require that the interface of all variants be the same or not? The focus of BPMN 2.0 seems to be more on the formalism and less on the issue you raise: what features need to be added to make the notation more useful to practitioners? I plan to blog about this one myself.

Answer / Clarification:
Variance - is the geographic, political, legal path that a process needs to take for the same business process definition. e.g Credit Check - my favorite, in US may be just a service call, but in Asia, it wil lbe a human task, or a series thereof approved by managers.