What is a ‘living’ application?

Essentially open source Business Process Management (BPM) software company Bonitasoft has introduced its Bonita 7.7 iteration release.

This is BPM software with Intelligent Continuous Improvement (ICI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) capabilities.

The company says that its ICI play here is a route to building what it has called adaptable ‘living’ applications.

A living application then being one that can deliver changes in terms of continuous improvement, continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous connectivity.

Bonitasoft ICI is described as an ‘application of process-mining’ to support human decision-making.

Found in this 7.7 release, ICI uses a this process mining approach to Machine Learning (ML) to assists users in making decisions to avoid possible process bottlenecks.

“Unlike the more common data mining approaches which focus on business data, or traditional process mining approaches which focus on process ‘discovery’ and conformance checking, ICI uses a new process mining extension on any existing business process, using both previous and real-time data to predict potential blockages and flag them so process managers can then take action to prevent delays,” explained  Miguel Valdes Faura, Bonitasoft CEO and co-founder.

In addition to real-time predictions, ICI also offers historical data exposure to build reports and dashboards for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

Analysis of process data could be useful for potential process design improvements, leading to continuous improvement that can be provided by the DevOps team with the other new Bonita offering, BCD.

The company says that Bonita 7.7’s BCD permits iterative experimentation and continuous improvement in development, applying technologies such as Git and Jenkins to support development collaboration and continuous integration.

“We’ve been working towards this release for a long time now, starting with the multi-layer architecture of Bonita 7.0 to allow independent, collaborative development of processes, user interfaces, and data,” said Valdes Faura. “Our BPM ‘DNA’ enables model-driven development. The UI design layer permits highly customised user interfaces by designers with different approaches.”

Valdes Faura says that his firm has given developers extension points and frameworks for application customisation. With this release the firm has added tools for agile development and continuous delivery of complex, custom applications.