Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Determining a Process Design Method
Problem
You want to start designing a business process, but you're not sure where to start.
Solution
Use the Top-Down approach, the Bottom-Up approach, or a combination of the two, the Meet
in the Middle approach.
Discussion
These three approaches are discussed in the following sections.
The Top-Down approach
With the Top-Down approach, you sketch out the process that you want to create. You might
conduct interviews with stakeholders in your organization and determine exactly what needs
to happen for a given business process. You could record this information on pencil and paper
or a white board, and eventually transfer the flow to a visual BPEL process designer.
You can then start designing composite services. Break up tasks into hierarchies, and be
sure to keep the service granularity at the appropriate level of abstraction, as described in
perspective, and consider what that invoker would like to see as parameters and returns. What
would a dream invocation of your service look like? It must be simple and clear, but also com-
plete.
Once all that is done, you can start to add technical details to the process, such as the port type
data and the WSDLs of the services involved. Build out the composite service as an orches-
tration by adding conditional logic, transformations, and error handling.
This approach is best when someone in your organization has come up with a new business
idea or when you are charged with streamlining an existing process, such as purchasing. You
may not have all of the services that you need to complete the orchestration already available,
but once you've identified what you need, you can build or purchase them.
This can also be a good approach when your team is organized into architects or business
modelers and analysts who can represent the abstract process itself, and developers who can
