“Less is more” carries the notion that simplicity and clarity lead to good design. This tiny phrase is attributed to the German-American architect and designer Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969). He was one of the founders of modern architecture, the last director of the famous “Bauhaus” and a proponent of the simplicity of style. This construction design rule is can be applied to software and model design as well.

Many surveys regarding tools used for process management and modeling show that Microsoft® Visio® is most frequently employed for this task; along with (amazingly) Excel® and PowerPoint® for business process documentation. The quality of such deliverables and their value for the company/organization differs by the functionality and modeling capabilities of the respective tool (and do not forget about the people’s experience and skills). The interesting question is: How to close the gap between the easy-to-use Office tools (so much loved by business folks and consultants) and those complex and costly tools preferred by architects?

People mostly believe that Microsoft® Visio® is just a simple drawing tool which is limited in scope when it comes to business process modeling and the complexities of business architecture. BPM-X® has enhanced Visio® by a smart repository approach so that the construction of a real business architecture is a breeze. As a result you can easily achieve a business and functional decomposition and structure your process diagrams into according to different levels of detail. In this way you may start from the overall enterprise perspective and end up on the implementation level with supporting IT systems and applications. And there are modeling languages like ArchiMate® and BPMN™ which help to visually express your enterprise and architecture using different viewpoints (diagrams).

The main objective of process mapping is to achieve transparency and to align business processes (BPs) with company rules or legal regulations for the benefit of compliance. BPs are documented as diagrams using for instance flow charts or BPMN™ notations. Process modeling on the other hand is the analysis and optimization of the business architecture. Doing so involves a functional decomposition of BPs and the use of different views and viewpoints like organizations, data, goals or the organizations’ performances.

With its Visio 2016 release Microsoft flips open a new chapter in the story of the most powerful diagramming solution in the market. TransWare has dedicated to the translation of model data and diagram formats of any of the variety of modeling tools like ARIS to Visio. As a free surplus Visio 2016 can be used as a modeling front-end tool to link to the TransWare BPM-X® enterprise repository server.The TransWare software tools are based on the latest multi-tenancy web service technology seamlessly connecting users and their data.

*TM Forum Frameworx for EA 17.5 now available at the shop!*

This webinar is about the availability the TM Forum Frameworx version 17 for modeling tools from Microsoft (Visio), Sparx Systems (Enterprise Architect) and Software AG (ARIS). The content of Frameworx can be loaded into those tools as diagrams and model, navigated to explore the details for Frameworx and be used as a best-practise to model the architecture of an organisation.

In test management it's a long and ongoing discussion if a better a system model or a specific test model should be elaborated to describe the behaviour of a SUT (system under test). In this post we include a webinar to present the BPM-X approach of using system models for test-case generation. Existing models like process flow documentations or ERP blueprints are re-used and improved to derive test-cases by the concept of model-based testing.