IBM BPM Interview Questions And Answers

1. What is IBM BPM?
Answer: BPM – BPM means business process management. There are various tools available to manage, create, organize and optimize the business processes.
IBM provides the BPM tool is called IBM BPM, Which has all good features of Websphere BPM+ Lombardi BPM.

2. What are Variables (Business Objects) in IBM BPM?
Answer: Business objects are called variables in Team works represent the data that provides the data that provides the business context to a running process. There are two types of variables -Simple and Complex variables have different scopes- private Input and Output.

3. What is an Activity in IBM BPM?
Answer: An Activity represents a logical unit of work that can be executed at run time by a Human or System.

4. What is different from the subprocess types?
Answer: There are three types of subprocesses that you can model in a BPD. Their characteristics are described in the following table.
Subprocess

A non-reusable subprocess that exists only within the parent process

Characteristics

Each subprocess must contain at least one start event with an implementation type of None.

Activity names must be unique concerning the top-level process activities, and all other subprocesses and event subprocesses under the same top-level process.

Variable Scope

Inherits variables from the parent process and can contain local private variables visible only within the subprocess.
Variable names declared in a subprocess cannot be the same as variable names declared in any of its parent processes. If there are multiple layers of embedding, with subprocesses contained within other subprocesses, variable names must be unique throughout the entire subprocess hierarchy.

Linked process

A call to another reusable process.

Characteristics

The process called by the linked process activity can contain multiple start events but must contain at least one start event with an implementation type of None.

Variable Scope

Variable data is local to each process, therefore data mapping is required to pass data into and out of the linked process.
Event subprocess

A specialized type of non-reusable subprocess that is not part of the normal sequence flow of its parent process, and which might occur zero or many times during the execution of the parent process.

Characteristics

Must contain a single start event, which can be one of:
Timer

Message

Error
Event subprocess execution can interrupt the parent processor can run in parallel.

Activity names must be unique concerning the top-level process activities, and all other subprocesses and event subprocesses under the same top-level process.

Boundary events are not supported on an event subprocess.
Variable Scope

Inherits variables from the parent process and can contain local private variables visible only within the subprocess.

Variable names declared in an event subprocess cannot be the same as variable names declared in any of its parent processes. If there are multiple layers of embedding, with event subprocesses contained within other subprocesses, variable names must be unique throughout the entire subprocess hierarchy.

5. What are the Coaches?
Answer: Coaches are the user interfaces for human services.

There are two types of user interfaces for human services: dashboards and task completion. To build either type of user interface for human services, you use Coaches.

When a Coach is a dashboard user interface, users can run it as a stand-alone user interface at any time. The users access it through the Process Portal.

When a Coach is a task completion user interface, it is part of the human service flow. At run time, when the flow enters the Coach, the user sees the user interface that is defined for that Coach. The user interface consists of an HTML code that is displayed in a web browser. The flow leaves the Coach when a boundary event occurs. A Coach can have multiple exits flows with each one associated with a different boundary event.

6. How do you analyze the time elapsed between the activities in the process?
Answer: If you want to analyze the amount of time that elapses between certain steps in your process, you can add tracking points to your BPD and then create a timing interval to capture the duration between defined start and endpoints. When you create a timing interval, you can create custom reports that enable you to calculate the duration of a process or compare the duration of several processes.

Do the following tasks before creating a timing interval:

Enable auto-tracking

Add tracking points to the business process definition
Create a tracking group to hold the timing interval data (make sure to add each tracking point to the tracking group you created)

7. What has changed in coaches in IBM BPM V8?
Answer: Coach views are a major addition. Improved error handling, and termination handling. Content Management integration, and other bug fixes.

8. What is the difference between the process app and toolkit?
Answer: Process App is deployable but the toolkit is not deployable it should be integrated.

9. What are Variables(Business Objects) in IBM BPM?
Answer: 
Business objects are called variables in Teamworks represent the data that provides the data that provides the business context to a running process. There are two types of variables -Simple And Complex variables have different scopes- private Input and Output.

10. How do you enable UCA to start a BPD?
Answer: If you want to run the startBpdWithName application programming interface (API) to start a BPD instance inside an undercover agent, set the property to true in the 100Custom.xml file or another override file. Restart the product, and check the TeamworksConfiguration.running.xml file to ensure that the setting has the appropriate value. The property is set to false by default, and if you don’t change it, you might have errors that prevent the BPD from starting. 

11. What are the tracks? How is it different from a versioning system like CVS?
Answer: Process Center tracks the changes in the process applications using Snapshots.

Snapshots:

Record the state of the items within a process application or track at a specific point in time.

From the Process Center console, you can create snapshots of your process applications.

You can also deploy particular snapshots of your process applications on the Process Servers in staging, test, and production environments.

Tracks:

Optional subdivisions in a process application based on team tasks or process application versions.

You can determine if additional tracks are necessary for each process application and if so, enable them at any time
Typically Tracks will be created from the production snapshot for maintenance purposes.

The difference from versioning systems like CVS.

Unlike typical versioning systems, tracks or snapshots cannot be merged at a later point of time. So, It will be challenging for parallel development.

12. What are the Components of IBM BPM?
Answer: At a high level, IBPM is comprised of several coarse-grained components. Taken together, these are the IBPM product. Each component serves a unique and distinct purpose and is employed at different stages in the development or operation of an IBPM solution. Breaking IBPM down into these constituent components both aids in the understanding of the product as well as providing a practical differentiation between phases and pieces of the operation.

  • Process Server
  • Process Designer
  • Process Center
  • Performance Data
  • Warehouse
  • Process Center Console
  • Process Portal
  • Process Admin Console

13. How will you access processes in BPM?
Answer: You can Start, Stop, Control and Monitor Processes using Process Portal.

14. Explain About Reports?
Answer: SLA full form is the Service Level Agreement. It mainly used to do work timely manner fashion
Simply SLA is an Agreement Between Two People.

15. What is the sub-process?
Answer: A subprocess represents a collection of logically related steps contained within a parent process. You can view a subprocess as a single activity, providing a simplified, high-level view of the parent process, or you can drill into the subprocess for a more detailed view of its contents.
Subprocesses can contain swimlanes that are distinct from the parent process. For example, activities in your subprocess can be carried out by a set of participants that is different from the set of participants that carry out the activities in the parent process.
Like other activities, subprocesses can be configured to run multiple times within the execution of the parent process by configuring looping behavior on the subprocess activity element in the parent process.

16. What are the differences between Coaches and Heritage Coaches?
Answer: 1. Coaches can contain multiple Coach Views. Coach Views are a reusable collection of user interfaces and can be bound to a data type. They can be shared between the Coaches. But in Heritage Coaches, all UI elements need to be recreated.

2. Coaches have web 2.0 appearance and behavior and have client-side data model i.e. data can be refreshed without the full page refresh. They use Dojo 1.7.3.

3. Instead of the one-button mechanism of Heritage Coaches, Coach Views use named boundary events. Programmers use boundary events for actions such as data updates with the server and transitions to other Coaches or services

4. Coaches support collaboration while Heritage Coaches do not. More than one person can work on the same Coach instance at the same time in their browsers

5. The control ID of a view-based Coach is different from the control ID of a Heritage Coach. The control ID of a Heritage Coach is the div node ID. This is not the case in view-based Coaches because Coach Views are reusable and you can have multiple views in a Coach.

17. How do you access a Child Coach view?
Answer: Context.getSubview(viewed, required order)
Accesses a subview instance given the subview ID. This method is similar to context.subview[viewid] except that the return value is an array of subview instances.

viewed(String) – the view ID or control ID of the subview
required order (boolean) – (optional) indicates whether the array returned needs to maintain the same order as in the DOM tree. The default value is false.

The call this.context.getSubview(“viewed”) returns an unsorted array of subview objects. The call this.context.getSubview(“viewed”, false) returns the exact same array.

The only difference between the two calls and the function callthis.context.getSubview(“viewed”, true) is thatthis.context.getSubview(“viewed”, true) returns an array of subview objects whose order matches the order of the DOM nodes in the DOM tree.

18. What are undercover agents (UCA)?
Answer: An undercover agent is started by an event. The event can be a message event, a content event, or a timer event that is the result of a specific schedule

Message events can originate from a Business Process Diagram (BPD), from a web service that you create, or from a message that you post to the JMS listener.

When an undercover agent executes, it invokes an IBM Business Process Manager service or a BPD in response to the event.

When you include a message event or content event in a BPD, you must attach an undercover agent to the event. For example, when a message event is received from an external system, an undercover agent is needed to trigger the message event in the BPD in response to the message.

19. What is a Durable Subscription?
Answer: When a message is sent to an offline user, the message waits in the queue and gets delivered when the user appears online again. This phenomenon is called as “Durable Subscription”.

20. What is Business State Machine?
Answer: BPC is a Business Process Choreography. It used for monitor Process Instance, Process Template and human task Instance, Human task Template.

21. What Is The Difference Between Obsolete Roman Backups And Expired Roman Backups?
Answer: The term obsolete does not mean the same as expired. In short obsolete means “not needed ” whereas expired means “not found.”

A status of “expired” means that the backup piece or backup set is not found in the backup destination. A status of “obsolete” means the backup piece is still available, but it is no longer needed. The backup piece is no longer needed since RMAN has been configured to no longer need this piece after so many days have elapsed, or so many backups have been performed.

22. What Is a Backup Set?
Answer: RMAN can store backup data in a logical structure called a backup set, which is the smallest unit of an RMAN backup. A backup set contains the data from one or more data files, archived redo logs, or control files or server parameter file.

23. What Is Auxiliary Channel In Roman? When Do You Need This?
Answer: 
An auxiliary channel is a link to auxiliary instance. If you do not have automatic channels configured, then before issuing the DUPLICATE command, manually allocate at least one auxiliary channel within the same RUN command. When a Duplicate Database created or table space point in time recovery is performed Auxiliary database is used. This database can either on the same host or a different host.

24. How Do I Go About Backing Up My Online Redo Logs?
Answer: Online redo logs should never, ever be included in a backup, regardless of whether that backup is performed hot or cold. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, you physically cannot backup a hot online redo log, and second, there is precisely zero need to do so in the first place because an archive redoes log is, by definition, a backup copy of a formerly on-line log. There is, however, a more practical reason: backing up the online logs yourself increases the risk that you will lose.

25. What Is Level 0, Level 1 Backup?
Answer: A level 0 incremental backup, which is the base for subsequent incremental backups, copies all blocks containing data, backing the data file up into a backup set just as a full backup would. A level 1 incremental backup can be either of the following types:

A differential backup, which backs up all blocks changed after the most recent incremental backup at level 1 or 0

A cumulative backup, which backs up all blocks changed after the most recent incremental backup at level 0

26. What Is Channel? How Do You Enable The Parallel Backups With Roman?
Answer: Use the ALLOCATE CHANNEL command to manually allocate a channel, which is a connection between RMAN and a database instance. To enable the parallel backups, allocate multiple manual channels in the run block or configure parallelism.

27. What Is The Difference Between Validate And Crosscheck?
Answer: The restore/validate and validate backupset commands test whether you can restore backups or copies.

You should use:
restore: validate when you want RMAN to choose which backups or copies should be tested.

validate backupset when you want to specify which backup sets should be tested.

28. What is Intermediate message Event Listener?
Answer: Intermediate message Event takes place in running the business process.

They tell the Business process to move a token forward in the process.
An Intermediate listener moves forward only if event output data matches with the co-relation data in the business process.

29. What is Teamworks?
Answer:

  • Teamworks is a BPM tool developed by Lombardi Software.
  • Teamworks architecture enables all groups within your enterprise to collaborate to design and deploy efficient processes.
  • Teamworks also allows you to manage and analyze process performance.
  • Teamworks is having Eclipse-based Authoring Environment integrates with your other development tools.

30. What are the Teamworks Components?
Answer: Shared Model: Stores all Process, Services, Performance Data, Business Events, and Conditions.

Process Server: Executes the Process and Services that authors build using Teamworks Authoring Environment.

Performance Server: Manages and aggregate Process Performance data and monitors business events and conditions.

Server Consoles: provide interfaces that enable the administrator to configure and maintain the Process Server and performance Server other users may have limited access to change the password and perform other basic tasks.

Authoring Environment: Eclipse-based development Environment consists of several interfaces that enable authors to Model, Simulate and Inspect processes. Available interfaces include Service Modeler, Process Inspector, Process Molder.

Process portal: Enables process participants to perform the assigned task, view the history of the task, launch any processes or services that are attached to the task and view the performance of their processes and teams. Tools available from the process portal include Scoreboards.

31. What is a Durable Subscription?
Answer: When a message is sent to an offline user, the message waits in the queue and gets delivered when the user appears online again. This phenomenon is called as “Durable Subscription”

32. Explain About SLA?
Answer: SLA full form is the Service Level Agreement. It mainly used to do work timely manner fashion
Simply SLA is an Agreement Between Two |People

33. How do you assign the activities to users?
Answer: For any activity with a BPM service implementation, you can designate the users who receive the runtime task by using the Assignments page in the properties for that activity.

In the Designer view, click activity in a BPD diagram to display its properties.

Go to the Assignments page in the properties view.

From the Assign To list, choose one of the following options:
Last User in Lane

Assigns the runtime task to the user who completed the activity that immediately precedes the selected activity in the swimlane.

Do not select this option for the first activity in a lane unless the activity is a service in a top-level BPD and a Start Event is in the lane.

In this case, the runtime task is routed to the user who started the BPD.

Lane Participant
Assigns the runtime task to the participant group associated with the

swimlane in which the selected activity is located (the default selection).

Routing Policy

Assigns the runtime task according to the policy that you establish.
List of Users

Assigns the runtime task to an ad hoc list of users.
Custom

Assigns the runtime task according to the JavaScript expression

that you provide in the corresponding field. To select one or more variables for your expression, click the variable selection icon next to the field.

The JavaScript expression produces results such as USER, ROLE, or PG, where user_name is the name of an IBM® BPM user (such as tw_author), group_name is the name of an IBM BPM security group (such as tw_authors), and participant_group is the name of a group of users in your enterprise.

34. What is Business State Machine?
Answer: Business state machines are service components that allow you to represent business processes based on states and events instead of a sequential business process model.

Business state machines specify the sequences of states, responses, and actions that an object or an interaction goes through in response to events.

Online IBM BPM Training

35. What is the snapshot in BPM?
Answer: Snapshot is as simple as Version management.

36. What is Rule Set or rule group?
Answer: A ruleset is a group of if/then statements or rules where the if is the condition and the then is the action of the rule. Rule sets are best suited for those business rules that have very few condition clauses.

37. What are the coaches and coach views? What is the primary function of coaches?
Answer: Coaches are the name for the web pages (user interface) that IBM Process Designers allows working on to build the human interaction. Coach views are new in BPM v8, where they are re-usable templates. We can create coach views for business objects and re-use them in multiple coaches.

38. What is serialization?
Answer: Serialization is mainly used to convert the XML to the Teamwork’s Object.
When we use web service integration service we will use serialization. The output of web service is XML So, we need to convert it to Team work’s Object.

39. How do you enable JavaScript debugging for the Coaches?
Answer: For debugging purposes, you can set your Coaches and Coach Views to use the readable versions of Dojo and the Coach framework JavaScript.
Open the administrative console and click Resources > Resource Environment > Resource Environment Provider
On the Resource environment providers page, click Mashups_ConfigService.
Under Additional Properties, click Custom Properties. The list of custom properties opens.
Click isDebug, change the Value field to true, and then click OK.
Save your changes to the master configuration.
Restart the application server instance.

40. What is UCA?
Answer: UnderCover, Agents are used to sending and receiving a message within teamwork. The body of the message is defined by teamwork’s service that is attached to the UCA.

41. How do you generate a unique ID for a Coach View at runtime?
Answer: In some situations, you might want to use the ID attribute for your DOM elements within a coach view. However, all DOM IDs must be globally unique. For example, during collaboration, the default highlighting behavior is implemented based on a unique DOM ID. To ensure a unique ID, you can use the $viewDOMID$ placeholder keyword. At run time, this keyword will be replaced by the Coach View DOM ID.

42. What are the different types of Human Tasks?
Answer: To-do task – a service schedules a piece of work for a person to perform.
Invocation task – a person uses a service.
Collaboration task – one person assigns work to another person.
Administration task – a person is granted administrative powers overactivity or process.

43. How a BPD can be divided into?
Answer: The BPD can be divided into Lanes and Milestones. The horizontal lines are called Lanes and vertical ones are called Milestones.

44. When Do You Use Crosscheck Command?
Answer: Crosscheck will be useful to check whether the catalog information is intact with OS-level information.

45. What is BPD?
Answer: To model a process, you must create a business process definition (BPD). A BPD is a reusable model of a process, defining what is common to all runtime instances of that process model.
A Business Process Definition (BPD) can include a lane for each system or group of users who participate in a process. A lane is a container for all the activities to be carried out by a specific group of users or by a system.

46. Explain the difference between ARCHIVELOG mode and NOARCHIVELOG mode and the benefits and disadvantages to each?
Answer: 1. An event listener is a widget that is added to our BPD. It tells our process to do something if an event occurs.
2. An event is anything that may happen outside our processor in our process that affects how our process runs.
3. An event listener cannot be added to the service layer. Presently they are used in our business process layer.

47. What is a Process in IBM BPM?
Answer: A process is like a Program that does works inside Teamworks. It has a starting point and at least one exit point.

48. Explain about Routing?
Answer: Routing is mainly used to assign the task to a particular Participant or Particular group. Same participant performing one or more tasks. ( Or) Assigning the same participant to one or more activities.

49. How do you perform validation on Coach Views?
Answer: To validate the data that is in the Coach before the flow proceeds to the next step in the service flow, add a validation node to the flow. The validation node can be a nested service or a server script. The server script is the simpler implementation although the nested service provides greater flexibility.
Example server script.

50. What is the gateway? or How do you converge or diverge the process flows? What are different gateways available and when do you use each?
Answer: Gateways control the divergence and convergence of a sequence flow, determining branching and merging of the paths that a runtime process can take.

You can model the following types of gateways in your process diagram:

Parallel (AND): Use a parallel, diverging gateway when you want the process to follow all available paths.

Use a parallel, converging gateway when you want to converge all available paths.

Inclusive (OR): Use inclusive, diverging gateway when you want to follow one or more available paths based on conditions that you specify.

Use downstream of an inclusive diverging gateway to converge multiple paths into a single path after all the active paths completed their runtime execution. The inclusive join looks upstream at each path to determine whether the path is active, in which case it waits. Otherwise, it passes the token through without waiting.

Note: Inclusive gateways can follow a maximum of n–1 paths. So, if you model a conditional split with three paths, the process can follow two of those paths

Exclusive (XOR): Use to model a point in the process execution where only one of several paths can be followed, depending on a condition, or to model a point in process execution when the token for one of several incoming paths is passed through the gateway.
Event: Use to model a point in the process execution where only one of several paths can be followed, depending on events that occur. A specific event, such as the receipt of a message or timer event, determines the path to be taken. An event gateway must be modeled a certain way as described in Modeling event gateways.
Be aware of the following when using gateways:

After you drag a gateway from the palette to your process diagram, you can choose any of the available gateway types.

When you model inclusive and exclusive gateways, if all conditions evaluate to false, the process follows the default sequence flow. The default sequence flow is the first sequence flow that you create from the gateway to the following activity, but you can change the default sequence flow at any time.

Note: Browse latest BPM Interview Questions and BPM Tutorials for beginners Here you can check BPM TOOLS Training details and IBM BPM Videos for self learning. Contact +91 988 502 2027 for more information.

Leave a Comment

FLAT 30% OFF

Coupon Code - GET30
SHOP NOW
* Terms & Conditions Apply
close-link