Business Analysts and Developers working in harmony

The idea of taking process diagrams drawn by business analysts and directly generating executable business processes is some that has always appealed to us at Cape Clear. So when I did some work recently with Yi Geo from eClarus in order to show their Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) tools working with our BPEL engine, I was keen to see such a scenario in action.

I set Yi Geo a challenge to start with a blank sheet and draw a simple process diagram which then becomes an executable business process running in Cape Clear Server. This he did, not once, but twice – you can see the results on our developer web site: Two new tutorials one a simple hello world scenario to get you started and of course the now almost mandatory loan approval scenario.

Yi’s white paper on the subject describes some of the issues involved when mapping BPMN to BPEL which makes for some interesting background reading and this is backed up by the tutorials which show the software in action.

Now, I'm not suggesting that developers are no longer needed – the tutorials have been structured to show the tasks performed by the business analyst and those performed by the developer – the difference is they are now working on the same artefact – the business process diagram.