XMI and BPMN

[contrem]

My organisation would like to perform all of the design activities going forward within EA.

We are also currently looking at BPM tools.

Ideally we would like to be able to design the processes in EA and be able to export them to the BPM tool. It would also be good if we could make changes to the process in the BPM tool and import those changes back into EA. (The BPM tools that we are looking at both support BPMN, but not XMI)

Would I be right to assume that the standard XMI export/import mechanism will not be able to handle either creating BPMN or consuming it? If this is the case, could I run a transformation from XMI to BPMN and vice-versa? Finally, if it is possible to transform between the two formats, how do I work out how to do it!!!!  

[«Midnight»]

You have a non-trivial problem there. One approach would be to learn how EA builds and handles its own XMI dialect, then develop a converter. Perhaps you could extract BPEL from your tools and do an XSLT transform to EA XMI.

Once upon a time Sparx opined that some future EA BPMN add-in version might support BPEL - Sparx seemed to indicate that this was on their development road map, but did not commit beyond that). I've seen nothing since it was first mentioned.

We live in hope.

[dbax]

I do not believe that, at least for now, that is possible without resorting to significant effort on your side.
BPMN in EA is really a stereotyped UML 2.1 Activity model that is further extended via tagged values to comply with BPMN notation as defined by the OMG. The "real" BPM tools have the capability to create BPEL (business process execution language - you probably knew that anyways) and usually that is how one would transfer all BPM related artifacts from one tool to another. However, even that might not be enough considering the fact that full BPM model is not bunch of activities, events, pools and lanes but is also connected to the underlying components which are usually modeled in UML and hence, there is a problem of moving the complete model along with process and execution components. I have (unsuccessfully) tested several tools and each time I found that significant rework needs to be done in order to re-create the same model.
My team and I have been using EA strictly for design and it provided us with much needed traceability and easiness of documentation (required by compliance regulation) and resorted to other BPM tools for process simulation and execution. The way we handled is to have teams working in parallel so that BPM in EA and in other tool is done simultaneously therefore not requiring significant rework.
On a more brighter note though, I believe there is an initiative coming from the OMG to merge BPMN into UML, at least for an upcoming UML profile for SOA, which would allow us to use XMI to the full extent for import/export activities. For now I only wish that EA is capable of generating BPEL out of BPM model so that we can deploy it directly into BPM server for execution.
Of course, I could be wrong with most of what I've said here since there are always people who will go further with investigation and testing and I would very much welcome someone to help us out with this.
Regards,

D