To Workflow or Not to Workflow?

Question

I am responsible for a team of developers who will are about to start development of a light weight insurance claims system. The system involves a lot of manual tasks and bu

Answer 1

I have come to this dilemma couple of times and I had chosen not to use Work Flow foundation. Some of considerations (similar to yours) were

1. Involved work flows were lot simpler (a combination of state machine and sequential actions) and doing it in WF seems to overkill for efforts involved.
2. Learning curve for developers to understand and to use WF effectively was considered high. Status transition table describing valid transitions and actions to be taken are used for additional flexibility and developers were comfortable with it, easily understanding the concept and purpose.
3. Chances of business process changes were slim and rudimentary changes were easily possible with help of transition table. A change in transition would mean a database script while change in actions would result in new release/patch. However, probability of such occurrence was deemed to be low.

Looking back after 13-14 months, I still think that decision of not using WF was correct. IMO, WF makes sense where there is strong likely hood that work flow can change and/or business rules can change. WF allows to isolate workflow in separate file and so making it configurable by users will be simpler.