Bonitasoft intros devops tool for digital process automation

Bonitasoft, an open source business process management (BPM) and low-code tool provider, has introduced several enhancements to simplify testing and operations management for business digital process automation (DPA) workflows. Key enhancements include the new Bonita Test Toolkit, a Docker image with health check features and various performance improvements. The enhancements  promise to enable more teams to extend devops workflows that are common in application development into business process automation. 

DPA is a type of low-code development tool that helps business users translate new ideas into executable processes — allowing teams to implement new ideas while ensuring compliance with privacy, security and customer regulations. 

Re-defining digital process automation

For decades, the core ideas have been a linchpin of BPM, but early efforts struggled with scalability and flexibility. Modern DPA variants take advantage of innovations in model-driven programming, low-code development and robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities. These tools have tended to focus on improving the application development side of the equation. 

Modern application development teams are increasingly adopting devops practices that improve the coordination across development, testing and operations teams. The new Bonitasoft features are designed to do the same for business processes. 

The Bonita Test Toolkit streamlines testing and deployment of complex, core and critical automation projects. Teams can test changes easily at each step and create complex libraries of tests to identify and fix subtle failure modes earlier in the development process. The new tools are also integrated into the Bonita Continuous Delivery add-on to automate testing processes. 

Writing tests is a necessity in the world of development, as they are the best way to ensure that a product fulfills its requirements and that existing features will not be broken by new development or improvements. This is also important for critical and core business processes that need to be tested at the business logic level. 

Efficiency is key

Previously, most of this testing involved a manual process, which could be inefficient and error-prone. The new toolkit allows developers to write automated integration tests on their processes that execute all the steps in a process and then check the corresponding outputs such as status, business data, tasks and authorizations. 

The Bonita Platform is provided as a Docker container, simplifying deployment with Kubernetes services on public and private cloud infrastructure. This allows enterprises to take advantage of serverless capabilities in the various cloud environments. Docker enhancements include a leaner runtime and a health check feature that can alert operations teams when something goes wrong. 

Competitors in this space include companies with low-code BPM platforms from Pega Systems and Appian. 

Philippe Laumay, Bonita Cloud Infrastructure manager, told VentureBeat the new enhancements provide an advantage for deploying new business processes across public and private cloud services. The new architecture can also simplify data integrity, availability, confidentiality and auditability across disparate cloud infrastructures.