Foreword by Joram Barrez

A picture is worth a thousand words

I believe this is a saying that exists in every culture around the world. And, truly, our minds are impressive image-processing machines, spotting structure and anomalies in a fraction of a second. Yet we tend to base much of our daily communication, both personal and professional, on the written word.

As software developers, we live in the most interesting of times, with the World Wide Web, the mobile (r)evolution, and the movement to the cloud with a clear focus on consumers. Yet the building process of that software remains complex—we produce pages and pages of lengthy documents to describe what we would like to see emerge from that ocean of zeroes and ones.

What if there were a way to improve this situation? As it happens, improving this situation is the main goal of those who are involved with BPM.

I started my career as a typical Java developer, a generalist doing tids and tads of everything involving Java. One day, out of the blue, I was assigned to a jBPM project. At that point, I had never heard of BPM or anything close to it. Long story short: I fell in love. I devoted my days, nights, and weekends to understanding the inner workings of the engine. Open source is a powerful potion, and I drank it. The community was hard to please (I got an “rtfm” on my first post) but responsive to those who were willing to learn and to share their knowledge.