BPM and state-machines

Posted February 24, 2008 in Programming

There are at least one business workflow that most programmers are already familiar with: defect management. I remember a migration from a custom database on Lotus Notes to an implementation based on Serena Teamtrack and the main part of it was to come up with a state-diagram explaining the defect workflow in detail. The same thing applies to programming-related approval workflows like change request management.

In that sense BPM is another case of Nothing New Under the Sun, I guess…State-machines have been one of the earliest successes of automatic code-generation. I-Logix (see history in pdf) and others have had state-machine-based code generation tools for a while now.

Interesting Interview: Tom Baeyens | FOSDEM:

My talk will be an attempt to show the value of BPM [Business Process Modeling] and workflow technology to developers. Managers are easily persuaded by BPM technology, because BPM is based on graphical diagrams that managers can understand. Developers are much more skeptical since they see much more alternatives to write this kind of software.