Best practice considerations – performance, extensibility, upgrade protection

Building task-driven applications is not easy as it can be seen from the sections within this chapter. As usual, the first steps are the most painful. Within this last section, some experiences from elementary implementation of best practices collected in real-world projects will be discussed, which can be used as hints for considerations about process and human task design when doing own implementations the first time.

General process design

How a process is designed is essential when building BPM applications. Ideally, a process's memory footprint is minimal to ensure platform stability and performance. This means that it carries as little business data as possible. In most cases, a technical identifier is suitable, which can be used to communicate with stateless service-evaluating process-flow-relevant data on demand. What applies to the processes applies to human tasks as well. The task payload should also be...