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

Go with the technology your team knows and feels comfortable with. Workflow Foundation is not a product that you can use straight away - it's rather a set of pieces you can embed in your application in order to build a workflow system. IMHO the workflow logic is the least important piece of technology, first of all you have to concentrate on the GUI because business owners will not see anything but the GUI. But if your system is a success then you have to be prepared for neverending change requests and new requirements so you have to implement your business logic so that it's easy to change and easy to divide into separate processes to suit different user needs (sometimes contradicting). BPM helps in this task because it allows you to have separate, multiple versions of business processes suiting various business needs. You don't need full fledged BPM engine for that but it's useful to code your business logic so that it can be versioned and divided into individual business processes - the worst thing to have is an unmantainable and intertangled blob of code that handles 'everything' and that no one can understand. There are many ideas for that - state machines, DSLs (domain specific languages), scripts etc - you decide what the implementation should be. But you should always think in terms of business processes and organize your logic accordingly so that it reflects these processes. And be prepared for coexistence of many variants of business logic and data structures - this is the most difficult design task imho.