Process modeling with BPMN

A whole course of modelling business processes.

More information

In one of my university courses, I had to model a number of business processes in a given organization and plan how they could be improved, all done in formalized approaches such as BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). While there is something not too positive to be said about lots of red tape, I have to admit that this course was relatively nice and let me explore possible implementations for an information system, without jumping headfirst into writing code.

What I did

While we used a variety of different models and tools, I'm mentioning the BPMN approach in particular, because of the rather nice bpmn.io tool, which presented itself as a very lightweight and usable tool. This was a stark contrast to the majority of awkward, buggy and slow Eclipse based tools that seem to be popular in academia for whatever reason.

What I learnt

While Eclipse can be good as an IDE in certain circumstances, taking a complicated modeling approach, implementing it as a plugin atop an already huge platform and then trying to make it somehow work without having plenty of validations in place, in regards to what actually makes sense within the modeling approach and what isn't valid, is a recipe for disaster. That's why it was nice to use bpmn.io, perhaps the approach itself is simple enough not to immediately become a weird and buggy mess.

No matter how you look at it, both in planning and your code it's important to manage complexity as best as you can.