I needed to describe the reason that an Agile approach to software development works, and why it is not something that is isolated to the development team. I wrote up the following explanation. Maybe this will be helpful to you in explaining agile development to others. Continue reading
See my previous post on Web 2.1: How OpenID will rescue Web 2.0 where I wax lyrical on how great it will be when I can have a single ID and use it everywhere. Well, I still think it is a good idea, and I still think it is the right approach, but I am considerably more disappointed about the level of support. Continue reading
The more I use windows UI, the more I believe that the concept of the “moded pop up dialog box” is not useful and unnecessary.
The “moded pop up dialog box” is a user interface technique that allows you to have a screen on display, and allow a user action to cause a new window to appear on top of it. The new window takes control. Continue reading
I am a self acknowledged “Site Registration Hater” (SRH). I hate registering at web sites. The whole concept behind Web 2.0 is collaboration: the content comes from individual contributors and we build the web together. But every single place where you want to make a contribution, you have to register as a “user” of that site. Continue reading
Here is a link to a podcast inteview on the subject of BPM and SOA — Different Sides of the Same Coin addressing these questions:
I will be speaking at SOA World Conference & Expo, June 23-24, in New York City on the subject of “Making Sense of the BPM & SOA Standards Alphabet Soup“.
Here is the description: What is BPEL? What is XPDL? How are they different? What is the best use for each? Continue reading
I just love that term: “Process Confabulation“. It sounds like something that WC Fields or Mark Twain might say. I saw it used in a slide share presentation from Michael zur Muehlen. What does it mean? It refers to an interesting problem in uncovering the process that a business organization is currently doing. Before any BPM project, you must first answer the question: “What is the current business process?” Continue reading
I am watching a number of comments being placed about a new effort for BPMN 2.0. Vishal Saxena says that the BPMN 2.0 metamodel should maintain this flexibility that BPMN 1.0/1.1 has. No argument there. Sebastian Stein says that BPMN is missing an exchange format, and clearly he does not know about XPDL. He goes on to say that the real problem is a lack of clear execution semantics. He points out that the OMG discusses two approaches: BPMN defines the semantics, and BPDM defines the semantics. Bruce Silver comments that the first approach would be the most value to the BPM community. We seem to agree that BPMN needs more clarity in expression. I suggest that there is a third approach that the OMG should consider. Continue reading
I attended the keynote by Dennis Wisnosky, CTO of Dept Of Defense, today at the Architecture & Process conference. He is currently on a campaign to get vendors to make truly interoperable implementations of BPM technology. He has been testing implementations of BPMN, and found disparity. Continue reading
I just want to highlight an excellent post by William Vambenepe on the subject of BPMN to BPEL: going to battle with one hand tied? He does a very simple experiment: draw a meaningful diagram in BPMN, in this case a fairly simple one involving an Inclusive-OR branch, and then attempt to convert this to BPEL. He does this conversion and presents the results is quite obviously a diagram that fails in fact to capture the exact meaning. He says he has no solution to this problem. Continue reading
Thinking Matters 