This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of Method and Style, and over the years it has held up well. Method and Style is a set of conventions layered on top of the BPMN standard - and, more recently, DMN and CMMN as well - intended to make the meaning of the model clear and complete [...]
One of the most common mistakes beginners make with BPMN stems from lack of clarity as to what exactly BPMN means by a process. A BPMN process is a defined set of sequences of activities, performed repeatedly in the course of business, starting from some triggering event and leading to some final state. The key [...]
In my BPMN Method and Style training, I show the following BPMN and ask students, "What does this diagram say?" You really cannot tell. It says something happens and then either the process ends or something else happens. Not very informative. But if you run Validation against the rules of the BPMN spec... no errors! [...]
In my BPMN Method and Style training, we use examples like the one below to illustrate the difference between interrupting and non-interrupting boundary events: Here an Order process with four subprocesses could possibly be cancelled by the Customer at any time. As you can see, a single physical Cancellation message from Customer is modeled as [...]
[This post is my presentation at Decision Camp 2022, delivered September 27, 2022.] As a longtime DMN practitioner and from the beginning one of its biggest boosters, I am what you call a true believer. But while DMN continues to gain traction, even I would have to admit it has so far underperformed in the [...]
Occasionally in my BPMN Method and Style training, a student will submit a Certification exercise containing a Conditional event. I have always rejected that. Conditional events are not part of Method and Style, and that's because I have always considered them to mean "some magic occurs". According to the spec, a Conditional event may be [...]
For many years my work has focused on non-executable BPMN using a set of conventions called Method and Style. In the past year or two I have turned my attention to Low-Code Business Automation, based on executable BPMN. When I wrote my book BPMN Method and Style - over a decade ago! - I imagined [...]
Cloud datastores are a new feature of the Trisotech Automation platform. They are most useful in BPMN, but they can serve also as input data in DMN. Datastores are a standard BPMN element representing persisted storage, accessed by a process task via data association but available for external access as well. In Trisotech's implementation, each [...]
Recently I viewed a DecisionCamp presentation on an application of DMN to a public-facing portal in the Netherlands for what we call in the USA building permits. Here is the link. The scope of the project is impressive, combining regulations defined at the national, provincial, and municipal level, plus those of special districts. The ultimate [...]
Interest in Business Automation is being accelerated by the thousands of public REST APIs available from countless service providers. Most are available on a Freemium basis - free low-volume use for development, with a modest monthly fee for production use. The Trisotech Low-Code Business Automation platform lets you incorporate these services in your BPMN models [...]