They used to say Seinfeld was a show about Nothing. But given its enduring influence on popular culture, Nothing is clearly not nothing. Attention must be paid. In DMN, as well, Nothing demands attention. In simple models like the ones we study in my DMN Method and Style Basics and Advanced training, it doesn't come [...]
One of the basic principles of DMN is that decision services are stateless, meaning that given the same set of input data values, the service output will always be the same. But sometimes it is convenient to break that rule with tool-specific extensions. For example, in Trisotech Decision Modeler the FEEL built-in functions Today and [...]
Last time I talked about how information is passed to a BPMN process from outside. All modelers need to understand that. This month I'm going to talk about data inside a BPMN process. If you are a typical process modeler, this is something you can usually safely ignore, because it pertains only to executable models. [...]
One aspect of BPMN that usually surprises newbies is attention to what entities or actors are inside the process vs outside. In traditional flowcharting, for example, the Customer is often represented as a swimlane in the Seller's process, but not so in BPMN. A BPMN process represents one participant's view of the steps, that of [...]
Last month I provided a brief overview of the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) standard. As it does for BPMN, Method and Style provides CMMN with additional diagrammatic conventions aimed at making the logic understandable from the printed diagrams alone. These conventions are formulated as "style rules" that can be applied as validation in [...]
They said it would never happen, but it has. CMMN Method and Style is now available. Here are the Table of Contents and Preface. Table of Contents Preface. v Method and Style. vi BPMN Method and Style. vi CMMN Method and Style. vii Structure of the Book. vii Acknowledgments ix 1. What Is CMMN?. 1 [...]
Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) is the poor stepchild of process modeling standards. It was developed a decade ago, around the same time as BPMN 2.0 and largely as a reaction to it by vendors who believed that "real" business processes were about knowledge workers interpreting documents, not web services orchestration following rigid rules. [...]
As I write this, everyone is freaking out over COVID-19. We know it is a highly contagious and dangerous disease, with particular risk to groups in a confined space such as an airplane or cruise ship. Researchers are scrambling to model the contagion risk, but detailed data is almost nonexistent. With a good model, you [...]
In recent posts I reviewed the use and benefits of BKMs and contexts for DMN modelers and stakeholders. This time we'll continue that theme with an explanation of another of DMN's woefully underutilized features, decision services. The introduction of decision service as a formal element in DMN came about in a surprising way. The spec's [...]
Last time I showed the value of Business Knowledge Models (BKMs), those misunderstood and often-maligned elements in DMN diagrams. In this post I'm going to try to do the same for contexts, another DMN feature that is similarly underappreciated and frequently disparaged by tool vendors that don't support them. Unlike BKMs, contexts are not DRG [...]
