what strategy work to update long-running process in SOA

In SOA practice, what strategies work better (or work at all) to update long running processes (in particular for Oracle BPEL)? For example, process may involve several human steps, which by their nature are time consuming. SOA Suites support starting new instances on new version of process and continue of running processes execution. But, what t开发者_StackOverflow中文版o do if the orchestration logic need to be updated and applied to already running instances? Let assume we do not want purchase orders to pass management approval, and would like this change to be applied to all orders, even those beying executed.

You cannot change the business process for anything which is in flight. Changes can only be applied to new processes. This is not a technical limitation, it is just common sense. Apart from anything, it would confuse audit trails or regulatory compliance.

If you have so catastrophically mis-designed a process - "we forgot to include management approval for orders!" "facepalm* - all you can do is shut off the server and clean up any half-completed processes. But that would be a really drastic step to take.

So the only strategy which is going to work is review and acceptance testing.