lessons learned on applying bpm and mdd practices to large banking and industrial scenarios with...
DESCRIPTION
Recent trends combine business process modeling (BPM) with model driven development (MDD) practices at the purpose of increasing the effectiveness of the development of software applications that must comply with business process requirements. In this chapter we report our experience of applying a MDD approach and tool to a set of representative industrial scenarios: one in the banking field, one focused on marketing content management, and one for managing company administration issues. To help close the gap between the modeling of business processes and the running software applications, we introduce automatic conversion of business process models (represented with BPMN) into application models (represented with WebML, Web Modeling Language), defined as abstract, platform-independent representations of the application structure and behavior. Application models are themselves amenable to the semi-automatic transformation into application code, resulting in extremely rapid prototyping and shorter time-to-market. We show how the proposed approach, based on a chain of transformations that ultimately produce the source code of the application, has proven effective in different industrial scenarios and we report some quantitative measures that demonstrate the increased development productivity.TRANSCRIPT
Marco BrambillaWebRatio - partner, Politecnico di Milano - A. Professor
Stefano ButtiWebRatio - co-founder and CEO
Lessons learned from applying BPM and MDD practices
to a large-scale banking scenariowith BPMN, WebML, and WebRatio
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• Overview of the approach
• WebRatio BPM
• Banking scenario requirements
• Organization of the work
• Size and effort
• Lessons learned
• Comparison to other projects
• Conclusions
Agenda
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• Model-Driven Development • Not only BP. Also UI, business logics, architectural issues• Reduce development effort, time to market• Increase prototype based interactions
• Business Process based applications • Main requirements are driven by processes and flowing
data
• Web/SOA environment• Wrap and reuse legacy systems• Build new applications with SOA backend for (future)
integration and reuse needs
Our approach: BPM + MDD + SOA
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Process Model
•Organization and roles•Activities and assignments•Business rules•Business workflow
It is based on BPMN notation
Application Model
•Page contents•Business logic•User interface & Visual identity•Integration
It is based on WebML modelling language
Different models concur to define the application requirements:
1. Design the Model Designthe Model
Customizethe Rules
Generatethe Application
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The generation rules used by WebRatio for building the final Web application are fully customizable and extensible. More specifically, you can define:
2. Customize the Rules
Layout templatesFor a perfectly fine-tuned layout, tailored to customer’s visual identity
Once defined, they can be reused for generating any application with the same visual identity
Custom model componentsWritten in Java and used for implementing any kind of business logic, integration or complex task
Once defined, they can be reused in any application model for implementing the same business logic
Designthe Model
Customizethe Rules
Generatethe Application
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Starting from the models and rules defined in the previous steps, WebRatio is able to automatically generate the final application. The result is: a standard and open Java Web application, with no proprietary runtime deployable on any Java Application Server
3. Generate the Application
IBMWebSphere
Caucho Resin
ApacheTomcat
OracleApplication
Server
JBossApplication
Server
Designthe Model
Customizethe Rules
Generatethe Application
Process layer
Servicelayer
Presentation layer
Datalayer
Integrationlayer
Standard JavaWeb application
Visual identity
Business layer
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•Major leasing holding in Europe • 2,900 employees, 17 European countries• products sold through 10,000 branches of
the group
• porting the entire software infrastructure from a legacy canned environment to an open and configurable platform combining
• BPM• Model-Driven development• SOA
• On one pilot country first, and then throughout Europe
Banking scenario
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Size
• The pilot application covers 52 business processes, comprising more than 1,100 activities spanning 30 user roles.
Effort
•Distribution: • 18% for BP analysis and modeling, • 12% for wrapping existing legacy procedures in SOA• 55% for the design and refinement of the application models• ...
Application size and effort
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• Awareness and willingness
• Understanding• customers were able to discuss the process models but they
weren't actually able to focus on the actual issues
• Continuous feedback and prototyping• Several processes issues were identified only through feedbacks
on the running application prototypes
•Separation of concerns• BPM is not everything! BPM, Data model, Application model, EA
(SOA)• Teamwork
• Evolution support• Process versioning
Lessons learned
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• 12 mid-size business process models
• Fairly simple processes are often used. Trivial ones?!
• The share of effort: • 12% process analysis• 53% application modeling• 20% graphical style
• General purpose application to be sold as off-the-shelf vertical to SMEs
• It condensates requirements from several concrete cases
CMS (Content Management System)
Project and order management
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• Good interaction and complementarity between:• Software producer (WebRatio)• Research center (Politecnico di Milano)• Big industrial customers (Unicredit, Acer, ... and bigger
ones I’ll tell you about in private)
• Extremely high value of real, running prototypes for interaction with customers
• Separation of concerns and identification of interface between different roles
Conclusion
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Some resources
www.webratio.com
www.webml.org
+ slideshare, twitter, linkedin, youtube
We were at the BPM 2010 conference in Hoboken, NJ
FREE BPM editor and prototype generation
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Questions?Marco Brambilla [email protected], @marcobrambi
Stefano [email protected], @stebutti
Thank you for your attention