The “Tea Testing Team” example (4 / 7)

a first process definition

back to the first draft

This is what our process looks like as a pseudo UML diagram :

It’s time to translate that into something the OpenWFEru workflow engine directly understands.

The first version of the process definition will be XML based :

<process-definition name="TeaTesting" revision="0.1">
    <sequence>
        <participant ref="Reception" />
        <participant ref="Ted" />
        <participant ref="Tang" />
        <participant ref="Takeshi" />
        <participant ref="PlanningTeam" />
    </sequence>
</process-definition>

This looks very simplistic. But it carries the essence of the process as currently carried out in [our imaginary] organization.

Since each participant of that business process currently takes 2 days for each sample (with 5 or 6 samples in parallel), why not try to make the process more efficient by at least removing two days ->

Your first impulse drew you to make the 3 wisemen tests run concurrently, but the Manager decided to place Takeshi-san test last.

<process-definition name="TeaTesting" revision="0.2">
    <sequence>
        <participant ref="reception" />
        <concurrence>
            <participant ref="ted" />
            <participant ref="tang" />
        </concurrence>
        <participant ref="takeshi" />
        <participant ref="planning" />
    </sequence>
</process-definition>

From 10 days down to 8 days. “We’re in no hurry, at least for that one”.

Let’s save that process definition in a file named teatesting_0.2.xml

We now have 1 process definition with 5 participants, can we run that process definition ?