Product Demo

In this five-and-a-half-minute demonstration video, we highlight the features of Flower that support the entire BPM lifecycle. Also we guide you through the Flower user interface.

Flower and Business Process Management

Flower for Jira is based on process models (process definition) and business process instances.

You define process models using the Flower BPMN Designer, a graphical editor, in the Flower UI. After you publish a process model, it is available in Jira.

Process Models (process definitions)

A process model represents a business process and describes the tasks (activities) involved in the process. Flower uses the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) to draw a model picture.

A process model has the following characteristics:

• A process model is static. The actual execution of the process model is described by the process instance, which holds the run-time information.
• A process model is versioned. Each time a process definition is published, a new version of that process definition is made available to users. The new version is used for process instances which are started after it is published; it does not affect any process instances that are already running.

Process Instances

As users work in Jira and Flower, they launch instances of process models. A process model can have an unlimited number of process instances in progress at any given time.

Administrators can view and terminate active process instances. For more information, see Managing process instances.

Agile vs Strict Mode

In Flower, there are two very different types of process execution. The most important distinction here is who makes the process decisions - the process owner or the process machine. This mode can be set separately for each process model:

• Agile Mode (default) focuses on people-oriented management and project-like processes where a higher degree of flexibility is required. The Flower process engine only makes recommendations for gateways and issue creation - but it never makes a decision or creates an issue itself. Every action must be taken by the process owner (project manager). This gives you maximum flexibility and can be useful for large, long-running or project-like processes. On the other hand, the process owner is always responsible for managing the process progress. Learn more about agile BPM
• In Strict Mode the Flower process engine takes full responsibility for all decisions and automatically creates Jira issues according to the process model. This requires having DMN rules for each gateway to allow clear decisions to be made. Strict mode must be enabled at BPMN model level.

NOTE: As a best practice approach, it is recommended to always perform the modeling and initial testing in agile mode to get a feel for the process automation. Later on you can easily switch to strict mode (and back if you wish).