Oracle BPA Suite first impressions

Enterprise architecture should be based on business drivers and strategy, constraints from the organization like budget and time, and architectural principles. When you model an architecture for a product or project, the same thing applies. It is important that the proposed architecture reflects business drivers and adheres to certain principles.
There are several tools available in the market to design or model architectures and applications. A modeling tool should be practical and help you reach your goal. To be helpful it should have the following characteristics:

• It should adhere to standards (like UML, BPEL, XMI)
• It should be possible to trace relationships between different perspectives (functional, data and application, technical for example) and between the architecture and the business strategy, and stakeholders and concerns.
• It should be easy to learn and easy to use
• It should be possible to publish (parts) of the model to html or rich text format, to communicate with the business and IT people
• It should be possible to import and export the model to other tools, to prevent vendor lock-in

The tool I have been using the last year and a half is Enterprise architect. It adheres to UML (not BPEL or BPMN), generates reports in html or rtf and is easy to use and to learn. It works well in JEE environments, supports reverse engineering and mda and is not very expensive.

Until recently, all Oracle had to offer was Designer or JDeveloper to model.
The problem with Designer is that it does not adhere to standards like UML and BPEL or BPMN. It is very good fit for projects and organisations that use CDM or CDM fast track and have traditional monolothic applications. It is not very useful when you are in a JEE or service oriented architecture environment. There are a lot of options and fields you can fill out. This makes it hard to learn. Once the model is in Designer, you can’t export it to another tool anymore, nor can you communicate it easily to the rest of the business. All you can do is export it to another repository or generate the fysical datamodel, PL/SQL code and or forms application.

JDeveloper on the other hand, adheres to standards like UML, XMI, BPEL and ERM. The problem is that there is no way to link different models together or publish the model in a webpage or report. It has limited possibilities which makes it easy to learn, but not always easy to use. JDeveloper is useful as a design tool for certain modules in your application, not to model the entire application or enterprise architecture.

At Oracle World, Oracle announced they added a new suite to the Fusion Middleware toolbox: Oracle BPA suite. It is marketed like this: “Oracle Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite speeds process innovation by rapidly modeling business processes and converting them into IT executables. Oracle BPA Suite, based on the market leading IDS Scheer ARIS Design Platform, delivers a comprehensive set of integrated products that allows business users to design, model, simulate, and optimize business processes to achieve maximum operational efficiency. ” To me that sounded like a tool that limits support to BPMN, BPML and BPEL. JDeveloper already supports BPEL, so I never bothered to try it. If you look at the roadmap and overview of the suite, it also looks like a very process oriented tool.

Last week, we were looking into several options for modeling an architecture and we decided to have a look at the BPA suite. To my surprise it supports much more than just business process analysis. It allows you to model business objectives, application architecture and several other aspects of the architecture using different methods and standards (UML, BPEL, BPMN, etc).
It is very easy to install: you double click the setup.exe and then all you need to do is “next”, “next”, “next” and within half an hour or so you are up and running. It uses a database as a repository, so it might not be very easy to integrate with repositories, versioning systems or document management systems in your enterprise.
It can import and export in XMI, save diagrams in emf, and generate reports concerning consistency and violations of rules. It also has a publisher component which publishes the content to communicate with the rest of the organization.

The way the integration with JDeveloper and the development process is pictured in the road map, seems very complex to me: have a look at Scott Amblers site about agile modeling, before you get lost in this new and cool modeling suite and forget what IT is all about: adding value to the business. In some situations all you need is a whiteboard or a pencil and some paper….

But if you do need a tool: don’t forget to take a look at the BPA suite!