Conference presentation given by Niels Lohmann on September 16, 2010 in Hoboken, NJ, USA at the Eighth International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2010).

1. How to implement a theory of
correctness in the area of
business processes and services
Niels Lohmann and Karsten Wolf

2. About us
• cooperation between
– University of Rostock
– Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• focus: correctness of business processes and services
• output: research papers + software tools
• 5+ years
• 30+ developers
• ~ 500,000 lines of source code
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3. What is this talk about?
what the title says what it is about
How to best practices, lessons learned
implement tool development
a theory academic environment
of correctness special requirements
in the area of BP and services the area you care about
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4. communication fingerprints realizability
s
registration validation uml activity diagrams
s
partner characterization compatibility petri nets
e
choreography correction controllability adaptation
n
business process model checking diagnosis ws-bpel
t
web service instance migration analysis decomposition
c
deadlock freedom test case generation workflow nets
service-technology.org
rre
process configuration modeling substitutability artifacts
o
model transformation operating guidelines composition
c
adaptive business processes correctness-by-design
conformance soundness verification partner synthesis
soa behavioral constraints choreographies
desynchronizability contracts refactoring
service discovery public view generation

5. Challenge #1: Correctness
theory
Is it possible? decidability result
How can it be done? algorithm
How does it really work? efficient algorithm
we already fail here
Is it actually useful? product
practice
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6. Lesson #1: Prototypes
• Have them early!
• Have a lot of them!
• Pros: • Cons:
– detect bottlenecks early – a lot of resources required
– avoid useless optimization – programming/optimization
– work on real data skills required
– propel technology transfer – rapid prototyping is hardly
rewarded by performance
evaluations
• Possible if you create the right environment!
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7. Lesson #1: Prototypes (bonus)
• prototypes
– make research results transparent
– make experiments repeatable
– allow for community benchmarks
– make comparisons simpler
service-technology.org live /
• service-technology.org/live:
– Website hosting our prototypes
– replay experiments in your
Web browser
– demo at 2:00 pm
at Babbio 430
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8. Challenge #2: Academic environment
Universities ≠ professional software companies
• hardly any tenure programmers
• definitely no coding pros
• coding is never top priority
• maintenance is not enforced
• programming is hardly enforced
• frequently changing staff (2-5 year frequency)
• hard to collect knowledge
• hard to keep consistency
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9. Lesson #2: Single purpose tools
• Goals:
– Limit exposed code base!
– Minimize dependencies!
– Reduce error horizons!
• Realization: single purpose tools
– UNIX philosophy
• small is beautiful
• make each program do one thing well
• everything is a stream
– complex tasks = tool interplay
– be minimalistic: no GUI
– simple integration via system call or service invocation
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10. Lesson #2: Single purpose tools - bonus
• single purpose tools: • other best practices applicable
– faster release cycles – pair programming
– propels prototyping – code reviews
– easier maintenance – test-driven development
– continuous integration
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11. Lesson #3: Code ownership
• give code away to students
– code ownership motivates improvement
– direct acknowledgment
– simplifies responsibilities
– trust and freedom are important!
• propel development with continuous integration
– reduces number of
broken builds
– visibility yields competition
– implement rankings
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12. Challenge #4: Formal methods
• complicated algorithms and formalisms
• Lesson: keep formalisms natural
– Do not limit the modeling formalism.
– Separate modeling and verification formalism.
– Keep verification technology domain-unspecific.
• Side remark:
– Domain-unspecific tools can
outperform specific tools
– Communication between tools
only relies on simple formalisms.
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13. How to implement a theory of correctness?
• rapid prototyping
allows to quickly validate and share algorithms
• single purpose tools
reduce code complexity
• code ownership and continuous integration
propel motivation and increases quality
• a simple and unified theory
also simplifies tool development
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14. Niels Lohmann
niels.lohmann@uni-rostock.de
http://service-technology.org
Tool demo
What: service-technology.org/live
When: today, 2.00 – 2.30 pm
Where: Babbio 430