Here at my organisation we're greatly appreciating the added BPMN functionality of recent EA builds, but they're something of a mixed blessing.
As an organisation we base our BPMN modelling on Bruce Silver's "Method and Style" approach, which presents us with some difficulties as Sparx EA is our tool of choice. Under Silver's style rules, a white box pool only ever represents a top level process, and is exactly equivalent to it. White box pools can never represent participants, although black box pools often do.
Prior to build 1110 we were forced to represent 'collapsed' business processes in collaboration diagrams as a business process element wrapped inside the corresponding pool, as messaging to 'naked' business process elements caused EA to hang. This is now resolved, but we're finding that adding a business process element to a collaboration diagram relocates the process to that diagram's package in the project browser, which isn't ideal.
We've experimented with not using business process elements at all, and always representing a top level process as a pool. Unfortunately it's not possible to associate a decomposition diagram with a pool, so this prevents us drilling down. We're also concerned as to how this approach might handle the export to XML.
Fundamentally we're looking for a way to represent each individual level one process as either a pool or a business process element depending on the diagram it appears in.
Our second main issue is that all global elements now appear to be considered as their own pool, irrespective of whether they're placed inside a pool or not. This means it's impossible to run sequence flows into or out of global tasks and subprocesses. I'm not entirely certain if this is a bug or a feature. Under the BPMN specification and Silver's style rules, sequence flows to a reusable task/subprocess are permitted.
We're not happy representing every called element with a service task messaging out to the called activity/subprocess, because many of our reusable subprocesses have a potential duration of days or weeks, and thus aren't suitable to be represented by a service task.
Any suggestions or upcoming functionality that might help with these issues would be very greatly appreciated.
