Design a process using BPMN

Designing a process model involves knowing your business, understanding the process, planning the workflow participants, and designing the task views.

Set up

Begin by building your BPMN diagrams with Modeler. To get started, ensure you’ve installed Flower form the Atlasian Marketplace (opens in a new tab).

Getting started with BPMN

Once logged in to your Flower, take the following steps:

Within Modeler, click Create Model. Right after creating your diagram, you can name it by replacing the New BPMN Diagram text with the name of your choice. E.g. Application Management

BPMN elements

Before building out the diagram for Application Management, let's examine the significance of the components on the left side of the screen.

You can build out a BPMN diagram for a process using several elements, including the following:

• Events: The things that happen. For example, start and end events which begin and terminate the process.
• Tasks: For example, user tasks for a particular user to complete, or service tasks. A Jira ticket is automatically created in the automation for each task.
• Gateways: For example, parallel gateways that move the process along between two tasks at the same time. Use expressions to access variables and calculate their value(s). They can be based both on the process instance and on the current task.
• Swim-lanes: Swim-lanes are part of a swim-lane-pool and are used to ensure that all activities in a lane always have the same Jira issue assignee. For a complete list of BPMN elements and their capabilities, visit the BPMN reference material.

BPMN templates

Sample workflows are provided with Flower to get you started quickly. You can use them as templates and learning tools for your own workflows. You can find the list of example process models here.

BPMN in Action

The Flower BPMN Process Designer is a graphic interface you use to define, publish, and manage BPMN processes. The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is used to design a process model and is the global standard for process modeling and one of the most important components of successful Business-IT-Alignment.

A fully documentation of the BPMN standard can be found here (The Ultimate Guid to BPMN).

To open the Flower BPMN Process Designer, access your Flower model repository and click at the pencil button at your selected model. Whether the menu item is displayed, depends on your Jira access permissions.

Using these elements, let's build out a BPMN diagram to examine the process of baking a cake.

Take the following steps:

Step 1: Start event

On our diagram, we've already been given an element as a start event in the shape of a circle. Click on the circle, and then the wrench icon to adjust this element. For now, keep it as a start event. Double click on the circle to add text.

• Click the circle to the right to start building.
• Click or drag a rectangle to create a task. Type to name it.
• Create an end event by selecting the thick circle.

Step 2: First task

Drag and drop an arrow to the first task (the rectangle shape), or click the start event, and then click the task element to automatically attach it.

Step 3: User task

Click on the task, then click on the wrench icon to declare it a user task, which will be named "First Activity" Note that each element added has adjustable attributes. Use the properties panel on the right side of the page to adjust these attributes. You can find more details about how to set issue summary, description and link Jira here

Step 4: Gateway

Click on the user task to connect a gateway to it. By clicking the wrench icon on the gateway and declaring it a parallel gateway, you can connect it to two tasks that can happen at the same time: mixing the ingredients, and preheating the oven. baking a cake bpmn sample

Step 5: Join Gateway

Attach the next gateway once these two tasks have completed to move forward.

Step 6: Another task

Add a user task to bake the cake, and finally a user task to ice the cake.

Step 7: End event

Add an end event, represented by a bold circle.

Step 8: Save and publish

Save your changes and publish a version to make it executable.

Further reading

• BPMN Modeler