Frank Michael Kraft's Blog

Usually I leave the predictions to analysts and prophets. That’s because it is so much work to achieve, what they already have predicted – or to find out, that it did not work.

Nevertheless this is a conviction, that has grown over time and a goal to which I can even see the path to the solution already now.

My prediction is, that in the future there will not be Applications on the one side and Business Process Management on the other side. But Business Process Management enabled Applications.

My prediction is, that in the future, there will not be the decision “Should I implement it as an Application or model it in a Business Process Management Suite?” any more. Because with BPM enabled Applications this is the same thing.

Business Objects will be Process Objects and Processes will be Business Objects.

And it will solve many of the discontinuities we have today trying to unify the two worlds.

This is my prediction.

Understanding Modeling Element of a modeling language – like BPMN 2.0 – is a necessary condition for successful modeling, but by no means sufficient.

Models must have a meaning within a context in the end, otherwise they are useless. For example what does a model mean, where there are acitivies like “go to the shop” and “buy some milk” and “pay”? It is a modeled description of what a person sometimes does, if he needs milk. But nothing else. The process model is to be used as documentation only. This is the context of the model. Such a model can not be used as a workflow. There is no need to create a workitem “pay” for buying milk. This is done by the shop’s design anyway. Also it can not be a web service orchestration description, because there is no web service “go to the shop”.

Modeling a process makes sense, if the context is know, in which the process will be embedded. The context is what I call an architecture. An architecture is a set of rules that determine under which boundary conditions a software system is to be designed. As part of such a design the design of a process makes sense. For example the architecture could be to design a system that is capable of performing the functionality of a milk web shop, that milk order and milk delivery are business objects that expose web services like “order” and “pay”, that there will be a workflow system that is able to compose these services – for example. The architecture are the rules that describe the creation of the system, the business objects, the web services and the workflow. These first need to be professionally defined and confirmed. They need to be obligatory for the whole project.

Only after that it makes sense to create models, which then will have a meaning within the context of the defined architecture. And therefore it is of very limited merit to “just model” or to train or coach modeling of a modeling language without a reference to a defined architecture or without the preceding process of professionally defining the reference architecture before. On the contrary – if the architecture is defined, then it perfectly makes sense to coach and govern a modeling process, because then there are the rules, that are needed for coaching and governance.

This is my opinion.

Again about the First European Workshop on Behavior Modelling in Model Driven Architecture [BM-MDA].

The second Presentation was about Weaving Executeability into UML Class Diagrams from Elvinia Riccobene of the Universtià degli Studi di Milano, Italy.

The introductory criticue about describing object contracts with a constraint language only (like OCL – or pre- and postconditions of methods / operations as mentioned before) was, that it was not possible to change the state of an object or a system by a postcondition. It was said, that it was better to describe this in an Abstract State Machine (ASM).

An ASM does not only describe preconditions for the execution of a function, but also the transition of the state – i.e. it is directly executable – platform independently (and thereby simulateable).

My personal opinion about this is, that in modelling the behavior of a business object a certain kind of nondeterminism is needed. For example if there would be a function “check credit limit” for a customer – this can be quite complex in terms of business functionality. So in an ASM you have the choice to model all the complexity of this decision, but then it is not a model any more, but it is the system implementation itself. So there is no other way than to do an abstraction and only model that ther outcome can be (granted, denied) or (granted, denied, manual decision needed) or whatever decision result needs to be modeled. If that is true, even in the ASM some nondeterminism is needed, which leads to limited executeability (i.e. a user must decide or chance or some simplified algorithm or the formalism is used for state space search).

But then the difference to modelling postconditions is not so big, because, the postcondition only states as well, that the result of the operation can be (granted, denied) or (granted, denied, manual decision needed). If the result is unary, then also the postcondition modelling can be used for execution.

In the succeeding part of the presentation it was explained in detail how ASM and UML class diagrams (as one example of any metamodel) can be weaved together to form new classes which are able to model the behavior in this language. But in my opinion first a common understanding on the more fundamental questions should be tried to reached, which I mentioned, before too much specific should deviate us from the discussion.