Architect Consultant blog

This is my last week in a Cordys project I did.. It was a high pressure Cordys Case Management project with an Agile approach. The things I learned (again) and in random order: You need Cordys consultants Introspection after each iteration Invest in automatic testing Invest in setting up your Services Invest in the Domain Model Requirement management (user stories) Consult a scrum master Assign responsibilities Cordys consultants The Cordys (BOP4.1) still contains bugs and this is not remarkable given the young produkt. However this means that you need to know if it is a programming error or a Cordys bug. For this you really need a Cordys  consultant who really knows the core produkt.  Introspection  Within each (Agile) project you will have difficulties with the development process. This is not a problem as long as you are open for introspection. This will help the project in what goes wrong and what goes well. If you do not do this then the process wi...

Today i saw a CDATA text within the BPM i used with the file poller. With the file poller you can trigger a webservice. In this case i triggered a executeProcess. Below a small part of the configuration of this polling mechanism.

Today I wanted to change the title of a UI, but could not find where the current title was set. I looked into the properties and settings of the XForms, but no succes. In the runtime the title I saw was: "Aanvraag Documenten" but the fields i saw were not: Name Description Caption I also looked at the corresponding JScript of the XForms and searched for setCaption. But also no success. Finally thanks to a tip of a colleague i found it. It was at the calling XForm that used the following construction: I would recommend to use the Caption field of the XForm itself, so that the title is always the same and in one place, unless of course you want the caption to be dynamic.

Introduction In a previous Blog I showed how to create a Dashboard from a Business Measure. In this Blog I will show how to create a KPI (Key Performance Indicator). As can be seen from the picture, a KPI is based on a Business Measure. A Business Measure measures parts of a process or data and a KPI monitors whether the measured part reaches a particular value. So: KPI helps to monitor and capture critical information pertaining to Business Process or Activity. Step 1 - Create Business Measure for KPI First you have to create a Business Measure on which the KPI will be based. In this example we take a Webservice as the source for the business measure. Create Business Measure Fill in the following details, and choose the correct Webservice Click Next and Select New to create a new webservice Click Finish The Business Measure and its corresponding webservice is generated. The UnitsinstocksMeasure can be used in a Dashboard. Step 2 - Create KPI Cre...

Monitoring Within an enterprise and on your processes you want monitoring. Monitoring is used to for example: View the number of ongoing processes and its status If certain KPI's are met Triggering other processes when a certain event takes place Cordys supports this in the form of BAM and uses certain constructs for this. In this Blog i will describe a small example on how to set up BAM and how to create Dashboards. It gives an idea on how this can be done in Cordys. I use the following picture in which the created Cordys artifacts are displayed. Step 1 - Create a webservice This step is not described here, but a webservice can be generated from a BPM, database or an external service can be used for example. Next i will use this webservice to create a Business Measure artifact. Step 2 - Create a Business Measure A Business Measure helps in measuring a particular aspect of a business process or any external data. The Business Measure provides a view on the...

Previous week I got my Cordys Fundamentals Certification and I will explain how to prepare for this exam. Of course it depends on the number of years/months experience you already have with the produkt. In my case i have done several projects already and i have almost three years experience. The certification has three parts: Multiple choice questions Handson Interview The most difficult part is the Multiple choice questions. This requires some study and this can be found on the Wiki. This gives a good overview of the questions you can expect. In the handson part you get a couple of questions which you must make. You have 5 days for the questions and these are relatively easy. I suggest you do the Fundamentals training online which is available on the Wiki. In case you already have project experience then even this is not needed. Within the interview you need to explain your solution of the handson and this is also easy if you made the questions yourself of course. Th...

When i use IE9 to run Cordys 4.1 i run into a white screen. This can be avoided by running the explorer in IE8 mode. This can be done in the following way. Start IE9 Press F12 Go to Menu Document Mode and select the IE8 mode Close the window again and reload the Cordys page

This year's Cordial was held on the 9th and 10th October in Putten. The yearly event is getting more popular because it was packed. Some of the highlights for me: A couple of very entertaining presentations with content. Must see: Freek Vermeulen  on why organisations find it so difficult to change. Magnus Lindkvist  on the present and future trends Meeting a lot of interesting people in the BPM field Partner dinner with excellent food Nice to hear that integration and BPM skills are still very much needed in the future :-) See the CEO of Cordys in person Presentation of CIZ of a project with Cordys Case Management. With  Ciber  i also participated within that project. So it was nice to hear of the succes The partnership of Cordys and Aquima . A business rule engine that can be used seeming less with Cordys And of course more can be found on  http://www.cordys.com/resources Looking forward to it again next year!

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My next project is probably a Oracle SOA Suite 11g project, so start reading the following book. A review of the book will follow ( http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-soa-suite-11g-administrators-handbook/book ) I hope to read useful information about How to set up Oracle SOA Suite projects How to unit test How to deploy to DTAP How to monitor How to error log How to govern

Business process management  (BPM)  is a  management approach  focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic  management approach  that promotes  business  effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with  technology .  Business process management  attempts to improve  processes  continuously. It could therefore be described as a “ process  optimization  process .” It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical  management   approach . Overview A  business   process  is a “series or network of value-added activities, performed by their relevant roles or collaborators, to purposefully achieve the common  business  goal.” These  processes  are critic...

In projects i often see that there is still a lot of confusion about User Stories and planning. This article of the famous Scott Ambler describes the way you should plan and use User Stories within Agile projects. One common mistake is that a User Story is much smaller than a Use Case. Introduction   to User Stories A good way to think about a user story is that it is a reminder to have a conversation with your customer (in XP,  project stakeholders  are called customers), which is another way to say it's a reminder to do some just-in-time analysis.  In short, user stories are very slim and high-level requirements artifacts. Initial  User Stories (Informal) As you can see in  Figure 1  user stories are small, much smaller than other usage requirement artifacts such as  use cases  or  usage scenarios .  It's important to recognize that each of the statements in  Figure 1  represents a single user story.  Figur...

It is not enough for today’s software developers to know their programming language well. There are further skills, that more and more companies are expecting from there employees. One of the most important is  Test Driven Development  (TDD). This is not an introduction to TDD. If you want to learn it, I recommend  Uncle Bob’s  awesome  Clean Code Videos  (Episode 6 - TDD) or simply  ask Google  for it. But many developers are writing bad code and applying TDD does not make them writing good code. Instead it makes them also writing bad tests. So this is about writing better test code. Applying simple rules To understand why test code can be bad, you should understand, what it should do. It should work as the parachute, that keeps you alive, when refactoring your code. Tests may help you to be sure nothing breaks, when adding new features to your code. But tests may also work as sample code, that documents your APIs better than any other doc...

Introduction I have read a book about Test Driven Development written by Kent Beck. This is a very famous and good book about test driven development with Java. This technique can also be adapted when developing a Service Oriented Architecture or implementing BPMs. For example with Cordys. This blog describes some guidelines. Some Guidelines Be sure to write your BPMs with as less context as possible This means that the context should be given as a parameter for example. In this case you can use soapUI or SOATester to test the BPM independently of the other BPMs. Each time there is an error within the BPM, be sure to write a test case for the error that shows the error After that solve the error and this way the test set also becomes bigger. Just like with the technique described within the book, you can start with writing the soapUI scripts first and then implement the BPMs This way your test cases should represent the exact requirements for the BPMs. These are just ...

In a lot of projects i have done for customers there are a few misunderstandings i often see with BPM or Business Process Management.  1) You are not doing BPM when using a BPM tool It is often called already BPM because it is hot, but the business is not process oriented at all. This is because a BPM tool is introduced bottom up, but the organization is not process oriented at all. In fact the business is process oriented (by default there is of course always a process), but this is not analysed or controlled.  2) Flexibility comes not for free This is maybe in theory but in practice i have rarely seen this. Making a solution flexible requires a lot of future knowledge which is often very difficult of course. You can only make your BPM solutions flexible where you know you need the flexibility.  3) BPM does not solve it all As with all new hypes, this is the next magic tool that solves it all. Of course this is not the case and it requires a lot of good thinkin...

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Introduction Cordys is used in small, medium as well as enterprise organisations. Within the Cordys Wiki you can find guidelines and best practices for the Folder structures and CWS environment (see [1]). When you want to use Cordys within the Enterprise I think these best practices are not recommended. In this Blog i will try to explain why. BPM/SOA 5-layering Architecture Every enterprise architect knows the 5-layering SOA enterprise architecture pattern: GUI - In this layer in which thin and thick clients are using the Business Services. Business Services - In this layer the Composite Services, like the enterprise business processes are implemented. Services - In this layer the Services are implemented. Applications - This layer is the integration layer towards the encapsulated applications. Data - This layer contains the data Most Cordys projects (at least that i have seen) uses Cordys (solutions and projects) like this: The solutions and projects are di...

On the 30th and 31th of May 2012 the first Cordys Solution Architect Accelerator Program took place at Putten, The Netherlands. A couple of potential Cordys Solution Architects of partners were invited to follow this program. I was one of the "lucky" ones. This program is setup so that more solution architects are trained and can be used in projects, because there is a miss in the field of Cordys projects. This was a first session and this session will also be held in US, UK and India. As always Cordys had organized this event very nice. There was also place for discussions and a social event in the evenening with bowling and BBQ. The program was: Day1: * High Level architecture overview of BOP4 * Security Models * Case Management * Workflow (part 1) Evening: Bowling, BBQ and Beers Day2: * Workflow (part 2) * CWS * Cordys Cloud Provisioning Next steps: The architecture team will help in developing more architectural patterns and best practices ...

Problem Today we went into a deadlock situation in our project. I like to share this case so that other Cordys developers are aware of this potential problem. Case: We have defined the following Long Lived Process. So we have 1 subprocess and a webservice call. There is 1 BPM Service Container that handles BPMs and Cases. The problem is with the webservice call. This is also a call that is handled by a BPM container, however NOT on the same thread as the one that started this BPM instance. So in case the long-lived thread pool is full, the webservice can not be handled by the BPM container and all BPM instances are locked. Solution Define a separate BPM Service Container for the Case Management handling and in this case the call is handled by a different thread pool. In general keep aware that in LongLived BPMs it can be dangerous to call BPM Webservices (like BPM generated webservices, case webservices, executeProcess webservice). Note: More can be found als...

You can test a decision table with the test tool of Cordys (see  Here ). However sometimes you want to automate tests with for example soapUI. In this case it is advised to generate a webservice from the Decision Table. This is nicely described  here . However I ran into a problem that the prefix of namespaces must be entered when the Decision Table was selected. After a while I found the problem. You use Schema files for the input of a Decision Table. Go to the definition of the Schema and double click it: The you should check the Namespace Prefix in this namespace. This prefix must NOT be empy. When I filled in the prefix I was able to generate the webservice on the Decision Table again.