How You Can Change JBoss BPM Suite the Open Source Way

Mortgage application process with
business terminology updates.

This is an update announcement where we have pushed out a new JBoss BPM Suite Demo project with some improvements, but it is also a showcase in how Open Source works at Red Hat with JBoss products.

The best part of this story is that you can follow along and track as direct usage of the product in a project results in refinements that make their way back into the community and eventually into the next version of product.

Let me explain.

Since the release of JBoss BPM Suite 6.0 we have had an example application around submitting a mortgage application, it was a fully supported example you can obtain with the product download. I have canned this example application in one of the JBoss Demo Central projects which you can find here:

https://github.com/jbossdemocentral/bpms-mortgage-demo

The original version of this process was based on a rather technical terminology with process steps not really aligning with a real business oriented solution that you would encounter in the field.

Original mortgage process with technical terminology.

A few weeks ago we showcased a collaboration effort with Signavio that demonstrated the transition of a process designed in the Signavio Process Editor and then imported into JBoss BPM Suite for further development of the actual implementation details around the process. This collaboration led to some discussion around the language used, we made some revisions and wanted to push these back out to all the users of the example application.

This is where Open Source is at its best, as we have the ability and tooling in place to facilitate providing all these new changes for every single person in the world that wants to make use of them. To do this there is a path to take that leads us from our local changes, back to the community and then into the product itself. 

Updated mortgage process with business
terminology to be imported into
JBoss BPM Suite from Signavio tooling.

This is the process we used and wanted to share so that in the future if you want to push your suggestions back into the products, you can see how this works:

1. Make all changes to the project you are working on, in our case we have a git repo in the Mortgage demo project (link above) that we want to push back to the community.
2. You have the option to raise a PR against the community code base, or as we choose to do here was just to raise a bug report in the public Red Hat Bugzilla system and attach the new product internal git repository as a zip file:
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1254656
3. Wait for the changes to be evaluated, prioritized and added to the jBPM community project.
4. When this bug is closed it will state which tag to watch for that will be created for productization to start towards a new JBoss BPM Suite release.

For now you can enjoy this new process not only in the JBoss BPM Suite Mortgage demo project and also as part for the showcase of the JBoss BPM Suite and Signavio integration demo project:

Looking to Automate your business?

https://github.com/jbossdemocentral/bpms-signavio-integration-demo

Looking forward to your contributions now that you know where to put them and remember, together we grow!