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Creating Reference Models (13)

Table of contents

1Insight

2Source model

Full Example – creating the ‘Core BPMN’ Reference Model

Table of contents

1Insight

2Source model

Insight

You should expect to do this kind of editing on any new Reference Model which has been based on some existing (source) modelling. It’s unlikely that that the source model will be perfect, and have all the element types, diagrams and connections you need. And it certainly won’t have any of the help text, URLs defined. And you’ll have to specify which are the best example diagrams, and any templates.

Source model

The ‘Existing Processes’ package contains some BPMN 2.0 models which are a good example of what we want to use for our reference model.

Step Description See Also
1 Create an initial Reference Model from the ‘Existing Processes’ package: right click, choose Specialize / Model Expert / Analyze and create Reference Model
2 Put this into a scratch or other package somewhere – you can move it later
3 This will create an RM, but not quite the one we want:
  • The Model Expert Analyzer thinks there are 4 kinds of diagrams we might like: we only want 2. One to show the process in its context, the other, the details of the process
  • There is no help text, help URL, template diagrams or example diagrams attached
4 Edit the Reference Model
  • See that lots of the element types all have the correct ‘BPMN2.0’ MDG. Others are just regular UML types
  • Rename the RM to ‘Core BPMN2’ (so we don’t get it confused with the supplied ‘Core BPMN’ example RM)
  • There is one strange element type: if you sort the element types by name, and there are two ‘Activity’ types: one a proper BPMB2.0 type, and other with no MDG: this must be a mistake in the source package. Just delete the non-BPMN2.0 activity type
  • Do the same with the ‘Decision’ type – we want to use the proper BPMN ‘Gateway’ decision.
  • Now look at the summary diagram. It’s quite hard to see the overall structure, but one place to start is any pair of element types which have multiple connectors. For example, ‘Activity’ and DataStore. It’s easy to see how these two are related, by just dropping the classes into a new diagram:

It looks like we now have the correct BPMN connector types: <<DataInputAssociation>> and <<DataOutputAssociation>>, but the source model seems to have some regular ‘Dependency’ relationships.

  • You can either delete these connectors directly in this diagram (careful!) , or do it from the Element Properties page
  • These seem to be the only strange connectors.
 Top 10 EA meta-model tips
5 Customize Reference model diagrams – Now we need to customize the types of diagram we want modellers to create.

What we want is:

  • “Basic process” – with all the BPMN2.0 element types
  • “Process context”, with just a BPMN2.0 Process, and all the other element types – use cases, user story, etc
6 Edit the ‘Diagram #2’ type – it looks to have most of the elements we want in the Basic Process diagram.
  • Rename the diagram type to ‘Basic process’
  • Add the ‘DataObject’ type to the list of elements which are allowed in this type of diagram
  • Add to the ‘help and guidance’ section:
    • If you have one, put a URL into the ‘Help URL’ – modellers can use this to get more information from your intranet site, or from the supplier of the RM. If you don’t have one, try linking back to this article: Creating an EA Reference Model
    • ‘Help Diagram’ is an example of ‘best practice’ for modellers to look at: Example Reference Models.Examples.2 – Core BPMN.Best practice.Basic process, the diagram ‘Example basic process diagram’
    • Add a template diagram, from Example Reference Models.Examples.2 – Core BPMN.Best practice.Template basic process diagram
    • We want ALL diagrams like this to have one start event, and at least one end event, so edit the multiplicities to show this.
    • The Modeller Notes are important – this will be seen when a modeller, or you, chooses to use this type of diagram.

 Editing RM diagram properties
7 Make one of the diagram types into the ‘process context’ diagram.
  • Choose the “Diagram #0” diagram type – this seems closest to the kind diagram we want.
  • Change it’s name to ‘Process context diagram’
  • It seems to have all the element types we want – all those which connect to the overall process
  • Add to the ‘Help and guidance’ section as above
8 Final tidy-up

Just to keep things neat, you can now delete the diagram types (diagram #1 and diagram #3) which we didn’t need, and also the EA diagrams which show what they can contain.

You could also update the diagrams for the diagram types which we just created: use the EA function ‘add related elements’ to add any missing types