By chance I stumbled over the blog post Draw your daily routine if you want to learn about workflow diagramming from Zsofia Herendi. She did a great post on how hard it actually is to understand real-life processes — and that drawing diagrams helps.

In business processes involving human workflow the task assignment logic can become quite elaborate. For instance the processing of insurance claims, or other variants of approval processes, may require many or complex task assignment rules. The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) decision tables are an excellent tool to manage such rules — outside of code, in a business user-friendly way.

We are happy to announce, that Camunda BPM 7.13 (scheduled for the end of May) includes full coverage of FEEL 1.2 – for more DMN notation elements than before:

• Input Expressions NEW!
• Input Entries
• Output Entries NEW!
• Literal Expressions NEW!

We achieved these improvements by adding the former Community Extension FEEL Scala Engine, written by Philipp Ossler, to the official Camunda Stack.

CamundaCon 2019 is just around the corner! Rob Parker, Enterprise Architect at Australia Post, will be presenting Innovative Problems For Elegant Solutions and he’s shared with us a sneak peak at the kind of out-of-the-box thinking his presentation will cover:

Everybody is likely familiar with Sudoku puzzles. When I solve them, I typically use little pencil marks to track which values are still feasible in unresolved cells. In other words, for each unresolved cell, I annotate it with the set of remaining possible values or its domain. As each cell is solved, the implication is propagated to its neighbouring cells by crossing off the infeasible values (domain narrowing) from each set of candidate values. This technique is effectively a form of constraint propagation with domain narrowing.

Decision tables are the most common element from DMN. They are easy to use and can solve many problems. However, DMN has more elements like Business Knowledge Models, Contexts, Literal Expressions, Function Definitions, Invocations and more.

In this post, I want to introduce the new extension for DMN and show how it can be used to model an example decision with the full power of DMN.

In Camunda, you can use scripts at different places of a process. For example, inside a Script Task, as an execution/task listener, as a condition expression on a sequence flow or inside an input/output mapping. Usually, the scripts are written in JavaScript, Groovy or JUEL.

Using the FEEL extension, it is also possible to write scripts in FEEL (Friendly Enough Expression Language) which is a part of the DMN specification.

I’m happy to announce the first release of the new community extension FEEL-Scala. FEEL is a part of the DMN specification of the OMG and stands for “Friendly Enough Expression Language”. It provides a simple data model and a syntax designed for a wide audience. The new community extension implements a large feature set of FEEL and replaces the default FEEL engine of the Camunda DMN engine.

We are happy to announce the Camunda Modeler version 1.6 release!

This release is a colorful one, with the addition of colors to BPMN. We also focused on improving the overall stability of the Modeler.

Download the new version from camunda.org.

We are happy to announce the Camunda Modeler version 1.5 release!

This release adds the ability to model Decision Requirement Diagrams (DRDs). On top of that, it brings huge performance improvements when working with large diagrams (BPMN, CMMN and DMN) and feature parity with Camunda BPM 7.6.

Download the new version from camunda.org.

You are using Confluence? We as community members developed two plugins which allows you to use bpmn-js/dmn-js as full-featured modeling tool within your wiki for BPMN/DMN. Both are available on the on the Atlassian marketplace for free.

8 Months ago, we created a benchmark for the DMN engine and measured the number of decision tables the engine can evaluate per second. Now, we had a second look at it to find a way to make the DMN engine even faster. In our benchmarks we see improvements in throughput of up to 6x.

We did a very successful roadshow the last weeks showing DMN amongst other topics. One thing which was always discussed is how to validate/test DMN decision tables.

I want to start with a quote of myself (to give you a good impression on my ego ;-)):

When authoring rules in a more agile, business-friendly way, do not forget about testing them in a more agile, business-friendly way.

This post shows various approaches discussed on the roadshow.

Decision Model and Notation (DMN) is the new kid on the block when it comes to defining decisions and business rules. Like BPMN and CMMN, it tries to bridge the gap between human readable definition of business-relevant aspects and technical realization. DMN therefore has a graphical representation as well as an XML-based serialization format and Camunda provides you with a beautiful editor to manage both. So why not go full DMN any minute now? Probably because you work with business rule definitions for much longer than DMN is around and you manage them in Excel. Recreating these with the DMN editor is a tedious task. That is where Camunda’s newest community extension comes into play: The Excel worksheet to DMN converter.

With camunda 7.4, we released the new Camunda DMN engine. Some people asked how fast the DMN engine is. So I created a benchmark measuring the number of decision tables the DMN engine can evaluate per second. Below you’ll see that I can push the performance to > 200.000 evaluated decisions / second on my notebook, using a single thread!

I created a Get Started Guide for Developers who are new to DMN. It guides you through modeling a DMN 1.1 decision table and executing it with the Camunda BPM Platform.

I was already asked a couple of times by customers where they should start reading about DMN and how to execute decision with Camunda BPM 7.4. Great that so many people want to start right away! So let’s make it easy, here are my personal favorites for now: