Wanted to explore the pros and cons of supporting more than just BPMN2 workflows for executing governance policies in DTGov2.

Pros:

• If we just want to validate an artifact, then adding a workflow around the task can be an overhead, so supporting other techniques (e.g. rules) could simply defining policies

Cons:

• Additional management - need to handle execution of the various types of policy and provide a consistent management infrastructure across each
• Potentially need authoring tools for each supported approach
• Event management becomes more complex

If we want to keep the infrastructure simple, so just support BPMN2 at its core with other capabilities provided by services, then how can we make it easier for users to create policies for the simple cases?

• Tools to create BPMN2 workflows
  • templating techniques? enable org to define a common workflow, and provide a simple UI to instantiate the template based on a set of properties
  • if wanting to use rules, then provide tooling to wrap/deploy the rules and create the invoking BPMN2 workflow
  • similarly, if main validation is being performed by a REST service, then possibly some tooling could be used to autogenerate the BPMN2 workflow - depends how complicated this may get
• Improved BPMN2 editing
  • Although some users may be ok with using Eclipse, many will want to use the web editor - need to see whether this editor can be separated out of jBPM to be a shared component