As a Business Process Management Software (BPMS) vendor, we at Bonitasoft face the challenge of addressing diversified projects from various industry sectors.We believe that the key to our success in doing so is to remain a generic solution. Yet, too much genericity may weigh on end-users and this can lead to rejection. Because Open Source is part of our roots, we value the capability to customize and extend our solution. However, despite proposing an open source code, the problem we faced a couple years ago was that there were too few people willing or able to contribute to our core.To counter that, we have continuously developed extension points in our software to simplify the act of contributing and we have provided a platform for sharing contributions. Adopting this strategy has proven to be rewarding and we have been able to leverage the creativity of our community. It has allowed us to avoid the pitfall of releasing a software that is generic but not flexible enough and instead, deliver tool that allows building business applications that can adapt to changes in real time. Follow this presentation and learn about the challenges we faced and how we addressed them.

1. Software extensibility of an
Open Source project
@PhilippeOzil
Technical Evangelist

2. Agenda
• Who we are and what we do (in short)
• The challenges we faced with contributions
• The strategy we devised to leverage
contributions & extensibility

3. Who we are and what we do
(in short)

4. Who we are
2003
• Project supported by Bull
• Project on OW2
Open Source project
initiated at INRIA Nancy
2001
Bonitasoft company
founded in Grenoble
2009
Presently
A couple of million of line of
codes later, we are still here
with happyusers and
customers J

5. What we do: a BPMS
• Process modeler
• Execution engine
• Form & application builder
• Data & document management
• Connectivity to Information System
• Organization management
• Reporting

6. Our software is all about extensibility
Our model:
• We provide a generic solution
• Users adapt it for a wide variety of use cases and industries
Implies a high degree of software extensibility
This is what Open Source is about!

7. The challenges we faced with
contributions

8. We are Open Source from the start but…
At first, we faced issues with code contributions
• Contributor ratio too low compared to actual users
• Too few contributions integrated in product
• Some custom code never contributed back

9. Quite a few technical constraints
• Project’s technical complexity and scale
• Multiplatform environment (OS, DB, application server)
• Legacy
• Genericity
• Robustness
• Performance & scalability

10. The strategy we devised to leverage
contributions & extensibility

11. Microservice based architecture
Moving from
Monolith
(legacy)
TO
Microservices

12. Extension points
Providing multiple lightweight extensions points
• adds value to the software
• simple to implement & test
• easy to deploy
• do not interfere with core functionalities
Currently 14 extension types
Connectors, Widgets, REST API extensions…

13. Central repository of community contributions
• Eases search for users
• Simplifies contribution and maintenance
Dedicated space for each project
In the end some users contribute on contributions
Community projects
Project page
Release mgmt. Issue tracker
Community
Projects

14. Conclusion

15. Conclusion
During this presentation we have
• Highlighted some of the challenges of handling
contribution on a large & mature Open Source project
• Presented some leads on how to address these

16. Visit us online
bonitasoft.com
Join our community
bonitasoft.org
Download
bonitasoft.com/downloads
Follow us on twitter
@bonitasoft
@PhilippeOzil
Thank you for your attention.
Q&A Time