Ideas on Enterprise Information Systems Development

This blog is devoted to ideas on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) development. It focuses on Lean Thinking, Agile Methods, and Free/Open Source Software, as means of improving EIS development and evolution, under a more practical than academical view. You may find here a lot of "thinking aloud" material, sometimes without scientific treatment... don't worry, this is a blog!
Every post is marked with at least one of Product or Process labels, meaning that they are related to execution techniques (programming and testing) or management techniques (planning and monitoring), respectively.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Enterprise Information Systems Patterns - Part IX

How to use EIS Patterns?
When eispatterns started to be developed, the original goal was to build a set of basic concepts that could be configured to represent various business entities. However, this seemed to be very hard to accomplish, since as new behavior appears, new code is necessary, making the economy of using masks to represent new entities being not enough to justify the use of the framework.
Therefore, the framework's focus shifted to on how to represent real world entities that dynamically acquire new responsibilities. Then, a new path was followed, by defining:
-Essential abstract concepts in the framework: Node, Resource, and Movement.
-The roles for each of the abstract concepts: Node: active, responsible for executing production operations; Resource: passive, responsible for storing  production resources data; and Movements: coordinative, responsible for managing the nodes while they work on resources.
-How to extend each of the concepts: Node: through Decorator Pattern; Resource: through subclassing; Movements: through configuration (better explained here).

Programming in EIS Patterns
In the project repository a super-simplified "bank system" can be found, with the intention of demonstrating how the framework can and should be used. The framework is process-centric, meaning that the development should evolve around the underlying business processes, by following these steps:

1) Represent the business process using a Process object. Ideally, this object should "absorb" the attributes and methods necessary to run as a workflow. For instance, if a state machine is used to represent business processes, the process object should have states (attributes) and transitions (methods), as well respond to specific events. Moreover, if it is decided to represent the same process using other notation, such as BPMN, this object must be transformed accordingly. We implemented Fluidity, a state machine for Python, which responds to these demands*. Process objects use simpler Movement objects to connect business operations to business processes and log their execution.

2) Define business decorators to adorn Node objects. Nodes are persons or machines which gain new responsibilities through business decorators, which in turn manipulate Nodes' input, processing and output areas. Business decorators make Nodes become the active part of the business process. Decorators must implement a decorate() method, where rules of association are defined using should-dsl. These rules ensure that a given object can be adorned by the decorator.

3) Each process activity (using a state machine: a transition or state action) must be realized by a business decorator method. These methods are called (business) operations, can be categorized, and are encapsulated by Movements**, which in turn are linked to the Process object. In that way, business decorators' methods take the responsibility of making the process work***. The same template can be used to configure different processes, using different operations to implement them.

4) Define the operations by decorating them with @operation. These operations should be able to ask for the transference of resources from/to the different nodes' areas using node's transfer() method. @operations implement the logic for each business process activity.

5) Define WorkItems, which are, in general, data bags or passive entities****. The reason for that is that in a real-world, physical production system, humans and machines transform or transport the work items using their abilities (@operations). A report is passive, being written by a human; a truck hood is passively spot-welded by a robot in a factory; a motor is passively transported from one manufacturing cell to another.

These steps are not necessarily executed in order, nor the business process is necessarily fully defined beforehand. It is envisioned a development process guided by the incrementally testing/building of the business processes. The use of templates is also a form of defining the acceptance criteria for the tests.

It is important to note that every class and every method must have a docstring, so that keyword searches can be performed by the Documenter module, which will be (soon) extended by Natural Language Processing facilities, so that requirements can be parsed and used to try to find candidate reusable elements in a given library of business decorators and work items. Complimentary, the Rule Checker is a module that runs the association rules of the business decorators found by the search, so that users can verify which of them can be used for adorning a given object. A new module will be developed to find and run  acceptance tests, so that the "live system" can be used to check its fitness to a given set of requirements.

*Note 1: In comparison with workflow engines and workflow libraries, Fluidity (in conjunction with Extreme Fluidity) is innovative, because while engines force the development inside their environment and libraries force the use of their objects to implement the process, Fluidity allows the definition of template machines that can be absorbed by any Python object. In other words, you can still use your own classes, your own naming convention, your own programming style, and your own architecture, in your own environment. The "state-based behavior" is inoculated into your objects dynamically. Moreover, if you don't want to use Fluidity anymore, your objects can expel the state machine at any time.

**Note 2: Movements are of the type Transformation - which transforms a given resource in a node's processing area, and Transportations - which transports a given resource from a node to another. These concepts became conceptual classifications of movements, only Movement objects do the job.

***Note 3: Implementing business process is a two step task: first a movement is configured to log an @operation execution, and then this operation is executed.
Using a state machine notation, the property movement.activity is set to a transition or a state action, and the  property movement.activity_associated_method is set to @operations. It would be easier if transitions and actions would be directly associated to @operations, however, Movements are necessary to store execution information (parameters, result, date and time) as well as to indicate the source and destination nodes. Source and destination nodes allow the mapping of the process to physical movements in the production plant. After configuration, a movement can be executed. These steps are implemented into Process objects, because they coordinate movements. This layered method improves reuse and configuration of processes and @operations.

**** Note 4: If workitems are physically aggregated to form a final product, this set of workitems must be promoted into a Kit, which can be "active" in some contexts.

No comments:

Post a Comment