Basic Elements of BPMN?

Business Process Model and Notation is a graphical representation for specifying the business processes in a business process model. It is also a flow chart method and standard for modelling the business process. BPMN will provide businesses to understand their internal business procedures in a graphical notation and will give organization the ability to communicate these processes in a standard manner.

BPMN diagrams allow different stakeholders to visualize the business processes and make the workflows more effective and efficient. It resolves the ambiguities of textual process specifications by visually designing the sequence of business activities and information flows to a specific process.

BPMN has designed to provide a standard notation readily understandable by all business stakeholders like Business Analyst, Technical Developers, and Business Managers. BPMN Can be describe the aim of all the stakeholders on the project adopting the common language to describe the process and avoid communication gap between business process design and implementation.

BPMN models are represented the simple diagrams which is construed by limited set of graphical elements. For both business users and developer, it is simply the understanding of business activities flow and process.

BPMN has four different elements

1.Flow Objects-

Descriptive object used to define a process. It includes Events, Activities, Gateway.

Events- Events are circular symbols that serve as a trigger-initiating a starting point, intermediate step, and end point of a particular process.

Activities- Activity is a particular activity or task performed by a person or system. It is shown by a rectangle with rounded corners. They can become more detailed with sub-processes, loops, compensations, and multiple instances. There are many activities process designers can create, for example activities that occur once, occur multiple times, or any specific set of conditions met.

Gateway-Gateway is the decision point that can adjust the path based on conditions or events. It is shown as diamonds. It can be exclusive or inclusive, parallel, complex, or based on data or events.

2.Connecting Object-

Flow objects are connected with each other using Connecting objects, It is of three types: Sequence Flow, Message Flow, and Association

Sequence flow-A Sequence Flow represented as a straight line with an arrow. It shows the order of the activity. It might show a conditional flow.

Message Flow- A Message Flow is represented with a dashed line with a circle at the starting and an arrow at the end. It’s described the relationship between different data and objects. A message flow never be used to connect activities or events within the same pool

Association- An Association represented as dotted line. It is used to associate an Artifact, data or text to a Flow Object

3.Swim lanes

Swimlane is used to organize different activities. There are two type of Swim lanes-

Pool- A Pool represented as big rectangle which contains many Flow Objects, Connecting Objects and Artifacts.

Lane- A Lane represented as a sub-part of the pool. The lanes are used to organize the Flow Objects, Connecting Objects and Artifacts.

4.Artifacts

Artifacts allow developers to add some more information into the model or diagram. There are three different types of Artifacts

Data Object-It shows what data is required for an activity

Group-It is used to group different activities but does not affect the flow in the diagram.

Annotation-It is used to give the reader of the model or diagram an understandable impression what is happening in the part of the diagram.