Thesis project released (under revision)

Montero thesis-project

View more documents from Ildefonso Montero.

Bufalo released!

After many months of work, I have finally completed one of the most important milestones of my doctoral thesis. Specifically, the implementation of a software tool to support the proposed Business Family Engineering methodology.

I named this tool with the name bufalo. Its aim is to cover the stages of "Business Family Domain Engineering" explained here. The following chart can be viewed as phases have been defined that are supported by the tool and which require the user to be performed.


Obviously the first phase, corresponding to Business Family Requirements Engineering takes place entirely by the user, as it is who defines the family members, their requirements, goals, etc. There are lots of tools that support these tasks, Enterprise Architect being the most commonly used alternative. That is why Bufalo is able to integrate and interact with the API of Enterprise Architect and obtain a complete definition of requirements specification document for each member of the family, independently of the template used. Besides the definitions of each business can be formatted in wiki format for project management applications such as Redmine and Trac, among others.


Once we have the definition of each business is when bufalo acts as a suitable position in the second phase, corresponding to Business Family Domain Design, orchestrating the process of extracting the business objectives of the definition, transforming these objectives a model of variability in the format you want, in the current version supports FAMA, and getting the definition of the core framework through a transformation process ATL between features and models business processes defined in BPMN.

Technically speaking, Bufalo is presented as a Maven plugin that can be launched through continuous integration systems like Hudson, which integrate into a software ecosystem is quite simple. The business definitions can be hosted on Subversion repositories and will be bufalo type who remove these definitions of the routes indicated process and get the core framework of each, as well as a definition of a Java object representing the family business identifiable by removing tags using the service in the cloud Yahoo Term Extraction. BPMN and FAMA models will be uploaded due to the Subversion user specified for each of the definitions of business.

Since the first version of the product, for now the definition of transformation rules as well as the evolution of business model are bound to be made by the user. At the end of the first quarter of next year is planned the publication of the release of the first version of this product, by now you can see how does the extraction of information from a business document defined in Enterprise Architect in the next video.

A real experience of BPMN implementation

Hi all, I will share with you a real experience of implementation of BPMN as a language for specification of business processes. One of the last projects I am working on is the definition of the procedures of the IT department of the Ministry of Employment of the Andalusian Goverment

I took the occasion to conduct a pilot project of introduction of BPMN as a notation for defining such procedures. The results are still excellent. We have a total of 42 99 business processes defined and have defined a template agile enough to have all the information necessary and sufficient.

The learning curve from the staff of the department has been very smooth and are pretty happy with the work done. With regard to the technical aspect, in principle thought to install an instance of Oryx, but I finally decided to make use of Visio templates and distribution of the definitions within the IT department collaborative environment based on Redmine.

Citations revisited

- From Feature Models to Business Processes
- Representing Runtime Variability in Business Driven Development Systems
- Business Family Engineering. Does it make sense?

Spanish Version of BPMN 2.0 Poster Available

I had the pleasure of participating in the Spanish translation of the official poster BPMN 2.0 together with two renowned researchers in the field of business process management such as Luciano Garcia-Banuelos and Marlon Dumas


On the BPM Offensive Berlin website you can get the Spanish version

Call for Participation - BPMN-Selftest by HU Berlin

The colleagues of BPMN-Selftest needs Spanish testers! test your knowledge of BPMN now!

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Call for Participation - BPMN-Selftest by HU Berlin
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Dear all,
we have launched a new website where you can test your comprehension of BPMN models at http://www.bpmn-selftest.org. The website is part of a research project of HU Berlin and TU Eindhoven. It will only be available until the end of February. While already more than 200 people from Germany and the Netherlands did the test, we have seen hardly any testers from Spain.

We would be very happy if you could participate and recommend the website to your process modeling colleagues. Its unique feature is that you get BPMN models shown along with questions. In the end you get immediate and individual feedback on what you did right and wrong. There is also a draw for prizes.

Thank you!
Jan

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Check out http://www.bpmn-selftest.org
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Prof. Dr. Jan Mendling
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik
Spandauer Straße 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany
Email: jan.mendling@wiwi.hu-berlin.de
Phone: +49 30 2093 5805
Fax: +49 30 2093 5741
Web: www.mendling.com
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Building an Oryx stencilset for Business Family Engineering

First of all, to congratulate Oryx developers team for their excellent work. The learning curve to develop new stencilsets is very soft.

I have decided, as self-purpose for this new year, to develop the I.T. infrastructure for providing support to my PhD proposal, a methodological framework for designing business information system families.

As a first step, I'm evaluating to define my own stencilsets in Oryx. The truth is that I'm quite happy with the result. More info about tool support, comming soon ...