I recently downloaded the 4.4 snapshot build and discovered that when you call several ActivityExecution.getActivity(), a JpbmException is thrown with error message "no environment to get org.jbpm.pvm.internal.session.Repository". It is possible to avoid this by creating an EnvironmentImpl object before calling the method on Activity, but since EnvironmentImpl is not part of the public interface and ActivityExecution.getActivity() is, this is not a good solution. The getActivity() method in ExecutionImpl should create the EnvironmentImpl object inside its implementation of getActivity().