Bonita BPM - not yet ready for continuous integration
March 08, 2016

Bonita BPM - not yet ready for continuous integration

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bonita BPM

Bonita BPM is used by the IT integration team to manage certain business processes. Other departments (typically customer care) may use the Bonita web application if they are involved in the process at some point. Bonita is used for processes that typically involve human interaction (not necessarily via Bonita) or long-running asynchronous operations. Such processes concern mostly life cycles of certain transactions that require asynchronous input from multiple systems. In this regard, Bonita is not so much used by humans as controlled by messages sent by other systems.
  • Bonita seems particularly suited for processes requiring a great deal of human interaction. Its user model allows you to control access to business processes in a fine-grained way. This allows for business processes to move smoothly between users and services as the process advances.
  • The definition and usage of custom forms from the latest version of Bonita seems particularly powerful. It allows for a thorough customization of the look-and-feel and does not require complex developments.
  • The web interface and administration section have greatly improved in the latest versions. Installation and configuration of processes has become more flexible and more structured. The administration section gives a good view on failed processes, allowing to analyse problems in an efficient way.
  • From a technical point of view, Bonita is not well-suited for integration in a development environment.
  • Upcoming support for 'unit' testing and continuous integration seems bloated and overly complex. Its starting point is clearly the Bonita point of view, not the development point of view.
  • To integrate Bonita efficiently in a continuous integration process, it should be possible to: completely build a process .bar without having to start the studio and/or server (typically a single maven plugin); deploy .bar files in a maven (or other) repository; start an embedded Bonita server automatically when running unit tests.
  • The usage of images and the (apparently mandatory) integration with Jenkins make this more complex than it should be.
  • The constraint to deploy only one database model on the server is particularly painful.
  • It necessitates that unrelated processes are combined into the same repository. In fact, it completely nullifies the possibility of having multiple repositories.
  • While it is definitely a great idea to allow process parameters to be configured in the web interface, it would be useful to allow import (and export) of these parameters as a .properties file. Currently, a re-install of a process requires you to reconfigure these parameters manually (not nice if there are more than a few parameters).
  • It is very unintuitive (and even illogical) that the XOR operator is named as such, while it does not act as an Exclusive Or when used with multiple incoming flows.
  • A formal ticketing system for encountered issues with Bonita studio and server would be nice. (if it exists, I was never pointed to it)
  • Mapping of values (message variables, process and sub-process variables, step variables) is often inconsistent. Certain cases allow the usage of scripts, others don't. Same for calling Java methods on an Object. Making this more consistent would avoid surprises and probably create lesser bugs. Data operations at the entry of a step would be useful too.
  • We've had serious problems with 'automated' processes in earlier versions of Bonita (via Talend), especially with connectors. In Bonita 7 we replaced these with REST calls, hoping for better performance.
  • Overall, using Bonita has not had a positive impact on our development efficiency. Moving from Talend (using Bonita 5) to Bonita 7 has improved this somewhat. Still, it remains a pain to integrate Bonita in the development and delivery process.
  • Migrating from Bonita 7.0 to 7.1 has proven to be a difficult undertaking, mainly on the database level. This has cost us a lot of time and better support would be welcomed.
Using Bonita as a part of Talend has definitely proven to be a bad choice. This was mainly due to the lack of support offered by Talend who seemed to act only as an intermediary.
We also looked at Camunda, which seemed to have similar performance issues with 'automated' processes as Bonita 5.
Bonita was initially selected for the higher-up hierarchy and the technical team never really compared with other products. I'm not aware of the reasons for selection.

As indicated in previous answers: less suitable for 'automated' processes

Bonita Platform Feature Ratings

Process designer
7
Process simulation
Not Rated
Business rules engine
Not Rated
SOA support
5
Process player
Not Rated
Support for modeling languages
7
Form builder
8
Model execution
Not Rated
Not Rated
Social collaboration tools
Not Rated
Dashboards
Not Rated
Standard reports
Not Rated
Custom reports
Not Rated
Content management
Not Rated