DevOps (software development and IT operations) aims to shorten the software application development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high quality. In LSPS, DevOps comes hand-in-hand with BPM - DevOps focusses more on the development of a business software system and BAM more on modeling and running the business supported by a software system. Actually, the both are the different sides of the same coin - a business system supported by software. Let’s match the phases of these two approaches:

The planning phase is about management of requirements, getting feedback from stakeholders, gathering the monitoring results, preparing the development roadmap and planning the next steps. Simply, everything what happens before coding and modeling. You can use your favorite tools for ticketing, planning, requirements management, etc., however, also LSPS tools can help in this stage. For instance, business engineers can use the Designer to model the desired solution or changes of the existing business model and to prototype it. They use well-known modeling instruments for “drawing” processes, organization structures, data, UI, etc.

Thank to the continuous model validation, content assistance of model parts, one-click deployment and instant execution of a model and automated unit/integration/system tests, the model-test-fix cycle is really fast with the Designer during the coding, building and testing phases. For custom LSPS application, all available Java coding, building and testing tools can be used. LSPS uses the Maven ecosystem for application building.

All the modeling and custom LSPS application artifacts can be put to a version control system (VCS) to allow continuous integration of new or changed project artifacts by concurrently working developers. The Designer provides out-of-the-box Eclipse tooling for GIT and specific compare/merge tools for all GO‑BPMN model artifacts built over any VCS used by IDE. The Designer IDE allows to use any other Eclipse plugin for VCS.

Continuous releasing, testing and deployment are usually automated by tools such as Jenkins, Atlassian Bamboo, CruiseControl, GitLab CI/CD, and similar. You can use any of your choice.

Another option is to let LSPS to create a Docker image with the whole LSPS Server, LSPS application and application model easily deployable to any environment which can run Docker, e.g., to the most of the cloud services.

Operation phase is identical to the Execution phase of BPM lifecycle when end-users are using the application.

Depending on requirements and accessability of the runtime environment, LSPS provides specific tools for application management and monitoring. Web-based LSPS Management Console, CLI for remote LSPS Server access and scripting tasks, or the Management perspective of the Designer tool. For technical monitoring of the application server, operating system resources, server resources, networking, etc. any tools can be used.

The issues of the application running and monitoring are usually recorded by a ticketing and problem-solving systems and come as input to the next planning phase.

With LSPS enriched by other 3rd-party (in our cases mostly free) tools we can effectively achieve continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous feedback - the main benefits of DevOps.

LSPS as a high-productivity platform uses model-driven development (MDD) to allow smaller teams of developers to define, build and deploy an application faster, at better level of quality and with minimal possible effort. Visual models also provide natural business-level abstraction which is comprehensive to business people who can contribute to or check the development artifacts. In the usual case, the initial specifications are made in the form of high-level business models created by business specialist and these models are later evolved into fully executional models by IT specialists. All in the same modeling language.

The Designer IDE provides comprehensive tools for collaborative modeling, model versioning, model comparison and merging, content-assistance, customizable model validation, manual and automatic model testing and model debugging. LSPS provides appreciable level of automation. There’s no need to transform created models to code - a valid model is naturally executable. Once it is uploaded to the Server, the model is checked, interpreted, executed within an LSPS Application and being monitored and managed by the CLI and Management Console tools.

LSPS applications are modeled in the Goal-Oriented Business Process Model and Notation (GO‑BPMN) visual modeling language. It covers modeling of the following business application aspects:

Business Processes

GO-BPMN conservatively extends the standard BPMN 2 language by declarative, problem-oriented goal-driven approach to modeling business processes. The application developer can use either “classical” BPMN procedural, flow-based style or goal-based modeling or their arbitrary combinations. LSPS provides a variety of out-of-the-box parametric task types and modeling libraries to be applied in human-centric, automatic, or hybrid business processes.
  More info: GO-BPMN spec on modeling processes | How to model processes in the Designer

Organization Structure

GO-BPMN provides a visual model of business organization structure in terms of hierarchies of parametric organization units and roles. Elements of organization structure are then used to control performers of process tasks and access rights to application data, functionality, and UI. User management provided by LSPS includes dynamic assignment of users to roles, user substitution, delegation of responsibility and other advanced mechanisms. LSPS execution engine then provides comprehensive inference mechanism to resolve elements of the modeled organization structure to particular application users valid in the current time and provides up to date to-do lists for business users.
  More info: GO-BPMN spec on organization model | How to model organization structure in the Designer

Data Types

Business and application-specific data types are modeled in GO-BPMN by the object-oriented (OO) language inspired by UML class diagram and enhanced by specific notation customized to the LSPS type system. GO-BPMN data model allow to specify records (entities similar to OO classes), their properties and methods, interfaces, enumerations, and relationships of various kinds. These instances of the specified types are available in the LSPS expression language to represent persistent business data, application-specific technical data, data transfer objects, reflection objects of LSPS model and their execution, LSPS system data, etc. Database, XML and JSON mapping are provided to automate persistency and customization of transformation the data objects to/from XML or JSON formats. GO-BPMN offers also advanced mechanism of specifying data constraints and constraints validation.
  More info: GO-BPMN spec on data type model | How to model data types in the Designer

User Interface

GO-BPMN model defined several possibiliteies. Built-in WYSIWYM form editor… several possible rnderers. Out-of-the-box Vaadin renderer. Forms are used in todo UI and documents - process-independent forms - part of model. Mention localization features.

Functionality

textual object-oriented expression language to glue all the models. Entities of all models become types of the expression language. Expressions are used to compute all values, decisions in processes, …. For performance purposes or to access functinality of other Java libraries, implementatin of functions or methods can be done in Java code which becomes part of LSPS application code deployed to Server.

Application API and Interfaces

SOAP web services, RESTful services, modeled application REST API.