----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 8:42
AM
Subject: RE: [ebxml-bp] XSD schema for
OASIS BPSS
Dale,
The issue of the Activity diagrams is that people
generally do not take the time to sit down and work out how to read
them. We spent lots of time on the phone explaining to our developers
and other designers explaining the nuances of the diagrams and the use of the
patterns. Once these people spent the time to understand most of them
saw that they were more powerful than a finite set of
scenarios.
The other issue you mentioned was the lack of modeling of
the ourt of band transactions. What we did to get round these was to
implement transactions that could be sent from our system to the partners
system. The consequence of this is that we suddenly had a doubling of
the number of Business transaction activities in a collab. as the BPSS
does not allow a BTA to be initiated by either partner.
One model would be to allow a transaction to run in
reverse, i.e. The normal would be that you send me an order and I send you a
order response. In the event of an out of band order placement, I send
you the customer the purchaseOrder Response and the customer sends me back the
order that they should have sent. In this way the transaction activity
has been completed and the states aligned.
Martin
Roberts
xml designer,
BT Exact
e-mail:
martin.me.roberts@bt.com
tel: +44(0) 1473
609785 clickdial
fax: +44(0) 1473 609834
Intranet Site :http://twiki.btlabs.bt.co.uk/twiki
Martin>> 1)
we found that customers do not seem to like to work with the activity
diagrams. Even though the ones we put out were accurate, someone else was
asked to explain them in more detail and subsequently issued a document
with scenarios in that were far more restrictive that they should have
been.
[<JJ>] It is clear that moving forward BPSS's control flow needs to
be redefined. We might also want to discuss if we want to come up
with a corresponding notation. BPMN comes to mind. MEGA had also done a
lot of work in this direction.
Dale> From Martin's description, I can not tell that using UML
activity diagrams is responsible for the difficulties reported or instead
the inaccurate use of that notation was at fault. I would like to
understand why an out of band process, such as the telephone based
subprocess, could not have been captured and added. If so, would the
overly restricted model been corrected? Although I am quite willing to
believe that any given UML view might be lacking some needed aspect (after
all, that is why there are so many of those model views!), I am not able
to see what features BPSS needs to add to its control flow, and why. I
have heard JJ mention adding some "numerical" constructs (such as exactly
N, at most N, at least N, M out of N, etc) to joins/merges. I would
be interested to know what additional BPSS control constructs might
be useful. Our charter, however, says we are not trying to construct
another execution language. That makes me concerned with the rationale for
any additions that are proposed. On JJ's later suggestion about looking at
BPMN and MEGA, I am not too familiar with these efforts. I heard,
possibly inaccurately, that BPMN was intended to support a common
graphical display presentation (I am sure there was more to it), and I
have not followed MEGA. JJ, could you post some pointers to descriptions
of results the TC members could/should be
considering?