Gonçalo Borrêga, from OutSystems, started his session sharing his history with OutSystems BPT: For the last couple of years Gonçalo has been working on a very complex claim handling system, with 708 activities, 501 business rules, and more than 4 million process instances running! And these are processes that run from 2 minutes to more than 2 years!
This claim handling system was refactored from another technology into BPT, using a set of ground rules Gonçalo's team applied.
- Know your process: Do deep & early analysis, with the help of your users.
- Aim for simplicity: Make it so you can show the process to your users. They will be interacting with the process via de UI!
Gonçalo then highlighted the 3 main features he believes differentiate OutSystems BPT from other vendors' solutions:
- Impact Analysis: Process upgrades are possible with the platform! Just do an impact analysis before publishing, and this will help you plan your deployments wisely
- The process is close to the data: No need to map the process data to the application data, TrueChange built-in, and an amazing event model are some if the benefits mentioned!
- The process is close to the UI: You can place a button in the UI to validate or close activities, and changes are applied to the process in realtime. This allows the UI to guide the users during the entire process.
Gonçalo then moved on to share some tips with the audience, based on his experience:
- Empower subprocesses: The platform supports creating really smart sub-processes, that can be reused throughout the application.
- Use smart labeling: Labels are shown to end-users in his inbox, so making them clear will really help users navigate the application
- Don't do cycles: Unless they really belong to the process, cycles shouldn't be used just to build logic.
In here he highlighted the ability to customize the end-users' inbox, showing screen shots of a very sophisticated inbox used on a particular project.
The session ended with a big round of applause, and some heavy duty QA that showed the audience was really into the problems and solutions Gonçalo shared today!
Hi,
The powerpoint is available at http://digs.by/avsVpO
Just drop me a line if you have any questions.
Cheers,
Gonçalo Borrêga