BPM-SOA Case Study ETH May 2009

Business Process Management and IT Architectural Design

The “T” case study

May, 11 2009 and May, 18 2009, Vorlesungsreihe Fallstudien aus der Praxis

In this lecture, we are exploring the basics of Business Process Management and IT Architectural Decision Making for Service-Oriented Architectures.

Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are two topics in the IT industry that have attracted considerable attention over the past years. In many industries, preconfigured reference models and design patterns for processes and architecture solutions exist. However, working with business process models in a concrete IT project and integrating IT architectural decisions into SOA design rapidly and efficiently into the software design process is not yet a widely available skill among IT professionals.

In this lecture, we explore the BPM and SOA decision making basics. Starting from an order management case study from the telecommunications industry we motivate the need for BPM and SOA design and introduce the following core concepts of BPM and SOA decision making:

• Functional and non-functional requirements in an IT project
• Main elements of the BPM life cycle
• Overview of the BPM/SOA technology portfolio
• Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN)
• Software architecture fundamentals: software quality attributes, architectural patterns, architectural decisions

We demonstrate how to create a business process model to capture the main functional requirements of an order management process and discuss how to systematically make selected architectural decisions to derive an SOA design from the functional and non-functional requirements.

Resources

• Slides of the lecture (including the Exercise Assignment): 1slide/page, 2slides/page.
• All on BPMN at bpmn.org.
• Steve White's original Whitepaper introducing the main BPMN modeling elements and an accompanying slide deck.
• The ORYX BPMN Editor of the Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam.
• A Microsoft PowerPoint slide containing a few BPMN elements if you want to draw the exercise process in Microsoft PowerPoint or in Open Office.
• The example process that we discussed in the lecture in IBM WebSphere Business Modeler XML format. To download the tool, register at the IBM Academic Initiative (middle left, do not use the student portal).
• Two templates in Microsoft PowerPoint to refine the presented architecture and capture your architectural decision.
• Software architecture resources from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University.
• An overview of important software quality attributes as classified by ISO/IEC 9126-1:2001.
• Books on architectural patterns compiled by the Hillside Group.
• The online catalog of enterprise integration patterns.

• Our Solution to the exercise: 1slide/page
2slides/page

For questions on the exercise please contact Jana Koehler for the BPM part and Olaf Zimmermann for the software architecture/SOA design part.