jBPM best practices - bringing your business processes to a good end

Fig. 1: Single end state

I wanted to put down some of the best practices for developing your business processes with JBoss jBPM. This is one of the simple tips that will make your business processes more flexible when creating monitoring reports for your manager.

The basic mistake that I often see is that business processes are created with a single end state, which is used from all points when wanting to reach completion.

Fig. 2: Multi end states

This provides no information as to the conditions that led the process to this end state. Figure 1 shows that we can end this business process from the first, second or third node. The problem is we only know that it has ended, but can not easily quantify which paths resulted in the completion of the business process.

Figure 2 shows the same business process implemented using a best practice of defining individual end states which can be easily mined for BAM or management reporting. Here we see that the business process catches the completion paths first, second and third via their respective end states.

I hope this jBPM best practice is of some use to you. Happy processing!