I need to work on a customer on boarding application. The workflow between various users can be implemented using JSF framework itself, with the help of faces confiq.xml I can specify the flow between various users. But here BPM is used with the help of webmethods tool. Does BPM is required always for implementation of workflow? What is its importance over normal implementation using other technologies?
Sassi,
in JSF you control only the pageflow between different UIs which can be part of a single activity which is performed by one user or or part of many activities.
A business process typically involves multiple people (participants / roles) and systems. The WfMS / BPMS for instance:
manages the task lists of the process participants
orchestrates the control flow between the different manual and system tasks
manages the process context information throughout the process (data. documents, persistence, versioning - ideally all ootb without coding)
provides rollback, error compensation features
creates an audit trail which is important for compliance / processes that need to be auditable (QA, regulators)
provides dashboards for operational monitoring
and reports for analysis and reporting of KPIs like averages process execution times or volumes grouped by different business data
allows you to model your business process in a graphical way, preferably in a standard notation (BPMN), which is much more user-friendly and a good basis for the communication between business and IT. The business will find it much harder to read the faces-config.xml.
supports the evaluation of simple or complex business rules to determine process flow and work assignment with user-friendly means
allows the
allows versioning of the process definitions (as if you had multiple faces-config versions in the classpath)
...
Find more BPMPS features and examples e.g. here http://www.eclipse.org/stardust/.
Eclipse Stardust is a mature and comprehensive open source BPMS which covers the aspects listed above and more.
There are lots of workflow solutions that are not a BPM system. However, a BPM system should always include a workflow solution. Presumably implemented by using a BPM notation standard and including kpi monitoring, business rules, simulation, user management, organization modeling and reporting. Although you could implement all those parts yourself in Java EE (with JSF) it would presumably take much more time.
Background
According to the Visual Studio ALM Rangers, there are two major approaches to sharing resources (e.g. common libraries which are used in many separate products) in TFS 2012:
Workspace mapping, setting up workspaces so that they point to the appropriate version of each required library and product.
Shared folders, using branch/merge to get and update the shared resource
At a glance, shared folders seems like the way to go, but a client that I am working with has experienced a lot of problems with that approach in Starteam, and is reluctant to try it again in TFS. I am currently in the process of assisting the client migrating from Starteam to TFS.
I have listed pros and cons with each approach, but I am uncertain if I have missed something.
Workspace mapping:
Simple to setup and understand
Easy to test a library change in several products
Easy to get latest changes in a library, and to submit changes to a library
No tracability, or at least less tracability, e.g. if a change in a library was introduced in Product A, how to track that change in Product B
Changes in libraries may affect products in an uncontrolled manner
Build gets more complicated
Each user must set up his/her workspace individually (but there are workspace templates in TFS 2012 Power Tools)
Folder mapping:
Everything that is needed is configured in a given branch
Isolation between products and branches
Builds are simplified
More control of changes
Requires more disk space
Requires more administration in the form of branching/merging and setup of branches
One particular problem is how to test library changes in several products. As I understand that would require testing in product A, then reverse integrate to library and forward integrate to product B, then test that product and so on.
Conclusion, and final question
The client has successfully used something similar to workspace mapping in Starteam for 10 years, and plan to continue to use that approach in TFS. Although they have the problem to keep track of library changes that affects several products.
They are afraid that folder sharing will get messy and complicated.
My question is, have I missed something in my list above? Are there more reasons for why an organisation not should use workspace mapping, or for why they should use folder sharing.
We have an application which is implemented for our own company.
By time, the application has been purchased by various companies.
For each company, we created a new TFS Branch in source control. And each one has been changed for specific customer requirements.
That's why the source code has many versions now.
Making a change became so difficult because the change needs to implemented and tested seperately for each branch if it is from a common structure.
What is the best and conventional way to manage source code?
Is it recommended to have a SINGLE SOLUTION that can run on each customer's systems.
There are several ways to handle customer-specific customizations, among them:
Keep a completely separate branch per customer and eventually merge code between branches. This is the solution you deploy right now.
Architect the application in a way where you have a customer-independent "kernel" which has pluggable custumization hooks. Only the customizations would be kept in separate independent repositories.
Put the customizations into a common application and make them configurable ("on/off").
Which route to take depends on the nature of the application and the amount of customizations per customer. If the context allows so, separate branches are least favourable due to the manual merging, bug fixing and testing overhead.
In a specific industry (telecom billing systems) I have seen all three: suppliers who work with dedicated code branches, others with pluggable customizations and configurable off-the-shelf products. Naturally, each supplier has a different level of customization flexibility, level of productification and integration approach.
As a software supplier the big trade-off is to balance the level of customization flexibility versus the level of productification.
Basically my project is product based.
Once we developed a project and catch the multiple client and deploy the application based on their needs.
But We decided to put the new features and project dependent modules are as component.
Now my application got many number of customer.
Every customer needs a different features based on the component.
But we have centralized component for all client . we move the components additional feature to client specific folder and deploy.
My problem is , I am unable maintain the components features for multiple client.
My component feature code is increased and I am unable to track the client features.
Is there any solution for maintaining the multiple component features for multiple client ?
I've worked for a couple of companies in a similar space - product software but very heavily customised.
Essentially there is a decision the company needs to make - are you a product company (that is you ship broadly the same to every client) or are you a bespoke company. At the moment it sounds like they're between two stools and wanting the economies of being a product company with the ability to meet specific client demands the way a bespoke software company can.
Assuming the company wants to be a product software company, unless there are specific technical reasons why you can't, you need to move to a single code base with the modifications for each customer being handled through customisable options (i.e. flags saying how this particular situation is being handled, whether this feature is available and so on).
These can be set at run time (so they can be changed as the client wants - think options in Word or Excel), or build time (so code is included / excluded when you do the build), but the key things is that every client has to be pulled from the same code base.
But this needs to be agreed with the business as it limits what they can sell - every change they sell has to fit into an overall vision which can be accommodated by the single product.
The alternative is that you're essentially producing bespoke software for each client (that is coded specifically for what they want) but using many common libraries. That's fine and allows you to produce something which is exactly what they want but in the end it is going to be more work and the business needs to understand and cost for that.
We actually do a bit of both - there is a server product which is identical for all clients, and then web and mobile clients which are specific to them (in the case of mobile you can't have lots of dead code on the device - the web stuff is historic and will be moving to a standard product for all clients).
Good luck though, it's a difficult problem with no easy solution.
You are essentially talking about software product lines (SPLs): variations from a common base. Since you already package your features as components, you need a specialized tool to manage such variations.
You can then build a complete custom application based on a configuration that is unique to any given customer. Easier said than done, of course.
A model-driven software development(MDSD) approach can help a lot on this task. One such system that can support this development setup is ABSE, an emerging MDSD approach that among other things, can implement a software product line (info at http://www.abse.info - Disclaimer: I am the ABSE project lead). There is no product yet though. An alpha preview is coming.
Again, I know some companies that, using an MDSD coupled with code generation, have achieved what I understand you want: products that are half pre-packaged, half custom.
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We have written a software package for a particular niche industry. This package has been pretty successful, to the extent that we have signed up several different clients in the industry, who use us as a hosted solution provider, and many others are knocking on our doors. If we achieve the kind of success that we're aiming for, we will have literally hundreds of clients, each with their own web site hosted on our servers.
Trouble is, each client comes in with their own little customizations and tweaks that they need for their own local circumstances and conditions, often (but not always) based on local state or even county legislation or bureaucracy. So while probably 90-95% of the system is the same across all clients, we're going to have to build and support these little customizations.
Moreover, the system is still very much a work in progress. There are enhancements and bug fixes happening continually on the core system that need to be applied across all clients.
We are writing code in .NET (ASP, C#), MS-SQL 2005 is our DB server, and we're using SourceGear Vault as our source control system. I have worked with branching in Vault before, and it's great if you only need to keep 2 or 3 branches synchronized - but we're looking at maintaining hundreds of branches, which is just unthinkable.
My question is: How do you recommend we manage all this?
I expect answers will be addressing things like object architecture, web server architecture, source control management, developer teams etc. I have a few ideas of my own, but I have no real experience in managing something like this, and I'd really appreciate hearing from people who have done this sort of thing before.
Thanks!
I would recommend against maintaining separate code branches per customer. This is a nightmare to maintain working code against your Core.
I do recommend you do implement the Strategy Pattern and cover your "customer customizations" with automated tests (e.g. Unit & Functional) whenever you are changing your Core.
UPDATE:
I recommend that before you get too many customers, you need to establish a system of creating and updating each of their websites. How involved you get is going to be balanced by your current revenue stream of course, but you should have an end in mind.
For example, when you just signed up Customer X (hopefully all via the web), their website will be created in XX minutes and send the customer an email stating it's ready.
You definitely want to setup a Continuous Integration (CI) environment. TeamCity is a great tool, and free.
With this in place, you'll be able to check your updates in a staging environment and can then apply those patches across your production instances.
Bottom Line: Once you get over a handful of customers, you need to start thinking about automating your operations and your deployment as yet another application to itself.
UPDATE: This post highlights the negative effects of branching per customer.
Our software has very similar requirements and I've picked up a few things over the years.
First of all, such customizations will cost you both in the short and long-term. If you have control over it, place some checks and balances such that sales & marketing do not over-zealously sell customizations.
I agree with the other posters that say NOT to use source control to manage this. It should be built into the project architecture wherever possible. When I first began working for my current employer, source control was being used for this and it quickly became a nightmare.
We use a separate database for each client, mainly because for many of our clients, the law or the client themselves require it due to privacy concerns, etc...
I would say that the business logic differences have probably been the least difficult part of the experience for us (your mileage may vary depending on the nature of the customizations required). For us, most variations in business logic can be broken down into a set of configuration values which we store in an xml file that is modified upon deployment (if machine specific) or stored in a client-specific folder and kept in source control (explained below). The business logic obtains these values at runtime and adjusts its execution appropriately. You can use this in concert with various strategy and factory patterns as well -- config fields can contain names of strategies etc... . Also, unit testing can be used to verify that you haven't broken things for other clients when you make changes. Currently, adding most new clients to the system involves simply mixing/matching the appropriate config values (as far as business logic is concerned).
More of a problem for us is managing the content of the site itself including the pages/style sheets/text strings/images, all of which our clients often want customized. The current approach that I've taken for this is to create a folder tree for each client that mirrors the main site - this tree is rooted at a folder named "custom" that is located in the main site folder and deployed with the site. Content placed in the client-specific set of folders either overrides or merges with the default content (depending on file type). At runtime the correct file is chosen based on the current context (user, language, etc...). The site can be made to serve multiple clients this way. Efficiency may also be a concern - you can use caching, etc... to make it faster (I use a custom VirtualPathProvider). The largest problem we run into is the burden of visually testing all of these pages when we need to make changes. Basically, to be 100% sure you haven't broken something in a client's custom setup when you have changed a shared stylesheet, image, etc... you would have to visually inspect every single page after any significant design change. I've developed some "feel" over time as to what changes can be comfortably made without breaking things, but it's still not a foolproof system by any means.
In my case I also have no control other than offering my opinion over which visual/code customizations are sold so MANY more of them than I would like have been sold and implemented.
This is not something that you want to solve with source control management, but within the architecture of your application.
I would come up with some sort of plugin like architecture. Which plugins to use for which website would then become a configuration issue and not a source control issue.
This allows you to use branches, etc. for the stuff that they are intended for: parallel development of code between (or maybe even over) releases. Each plugin becomes a seperate project (or subproject) within your source code system. This also allows you to combine all plugins and your main application into one visual studio solution to help with dependency analisys etc.
Loosely coupling the various components in your application is the best way to go.
As mention before, source control does not sound like a good solution for your problem. To me it sounds that is better yo have a single code base using a multi-tenant architecture. This way you get a lot of benefits in terms of managing your application, load on the service, scalability, etc.
Our product using this approach and what we have is some (a lot) of core functionality that is the same for all clients, custom modules that are used by one or more clients and at the core a the "customization" is a simple workflow engine that uses different workflows for different clients, so each clients gets the core functionality, its own workflow(s) and some extended set of modules that are either client specific or generalized for more that one client.
Here's something to get you started on multi-tenancy architecture:
Multi-Tenant Data Architecture
SaaS database tenancy patterns
Without more info, such as types of client specific customization, one can only guess how deep or superficial the changes are. Some simple/standard approaches to consider:
If you can keep a central config specifying the uniqueness from client to client
If you can centralize the business rules to one class or group of classes
If you can store the business rules in the database and pull out based on client
If the business rules can all be DB/SQL based (each client having their own DB
Overall hard coding differences based on client name/id is very problematic, keeping different code bases per client is costly (think of the complete testing/retesting time required for the 90% that doesn't change)...I think more info is required to properly answer (give some specifics)
Layer the application. One of those layers contains customizations and should be able to be pulled out at any time without affect on the rest of the system. Application- and DB-level "triggers" (quoted because they may or many not employ actual DB triggers) that call customer-specific code or are parametrized with customer keys) are very helpful.
Core should never be customized, but you must layer it in somewhere, even if it is simplistic web filtering.
What we have is a a core datbase that has the functionality that all clients get. Then each client has a separate database that contains the customizations for that client. This is expensive in terms of maintenance. The other problem is that when two clients ask for a simliar functionality, it is often done differnetly by the two separate teams. There is currently little done to share custiomizations between clients and make common ones become part of the core application. Each client has their own application portal, so we don't have the worry about a change to one client affecting some other client.
Right now we are looking at changing to a process using a rules engine, but there is some concern that the perfomance won't be there for the number of records we need to be able to process. However, in your circumstances, this might be a viable alternative.
I've used some applications that offered the following customizations:
Web pages were configurable - we could drag fields out of view, position them where we wanted with our own name for the field label.
Add our own views or stored procedures and use them in: data grids (along with an update proc) and reports. Each client would need their own database.
Custom mapping of Excel files to import data into system.
Add our own calculated fields.
Ability to run custom scripts on forms during various events.
Identify our own custom fields.
If you clients are larger companies, you're almost going to need your own SDK, API's, etc.