Eclipse Free BIRD Tools introduces RPMN (Regulatory Process and Modelling Notation) as an open standard for Regulatory experts to easily describe and collaborate on machine readable requirements documents without programming experience.
RPMN is compatible with the artefacts published by BIRD for data models and transformations (and can be used with other regulatory data models and logic also)
RPMN allows solution developers to auto-create a skeleton of a tech solution (e.g. data base schemas and programming language functions) from RPMN as machine written solutions.
These machine written solutions are always in synch with the requirements doc, and gaps in functionality can be completed by technical programmers.
RPMN is inspired by and re-uses other standards typically used in defining regulatory requirements docs such as BPMN,ER-Diagrams and SQL, but refines these to use only what is most appropriate for regulatory processes, and establishes navigable links between the parts of the standard such as workflow to datamodel
RPMN is an open standard, RPMN has a language-neutral model to help technical tool developers to create business-user friendly tools on top of RPMN. The Eclipse Free BIRD Tools project provides open source tools based on RPMN in Python and Java.
The initial RPMN specification is available at the Github Wiki
RPMN has 3 parts as shown in the diagram below, these are described in more detail below
For business users RPMN (Regulatory Process Model and Notation) is just 2 things: Some simple diagrams and associated simple text formats.
Users can choose to interact with either visual or text formats .
The text files are human readable text files and easily stored in version control systems like Git/GitHub/GitLab/SVN .
It is easy to display and understand the difference between 2 versions of the text file
We have a different diagram and text format for each of these regulatory artefacts
Artefact Type | Image Type | Diagram | Text Example |
---|---|---|---|
DataModel | DataModel | ||
Workflow | Workflow | ||
Workflow | Workflow lineage | ||
Report Generation | No Diagram just text | ||
Requirements | Requirements book | ||
Test | Test Data | ||
Test | Unit Test Scope | ||
Test | E2E Test Scope |
RPMN is a definition of diagrams and associated human readable file formats allowing regulatory experts to describe and collaborate on regulatory artefacts as a machine readable requirements document.
Associated with these file formats is a UML model. This model describes classes, their attributes and relationships.
Technical users can use this model to programmatically generate solution skeletons in an executable language of there choice.
The same model can be used by technical developers who wish to create tools for editing and visualising RPMN.
Group | Name | Class Diagram | Documentation |
---|---|---|---|
RPMN | Data Model | UML Class Diagram | Documentation |
RPMN | Workflow | UML Class Diagram | Documentation |
RPMN | Report Generation | UML Class Diagram | Documentation |
RPMN | Business Requirements/Regulations | UML Class Diagram | Documentation |
RPMN | Tests | UML Class Diagram | Documentation |
RPMN | Module Management | UML Class Diagram | Documentation |