We experimented with a workflow engine at my last job (jBPM), and it was a colossal waste of time. I have a colleague who uses it very effectively at another j

We experimented with a workflow engine at my last job (jBPM), and it was a colossal waste of time. I have a colleague who uses it very effectively at another job. I think it's important to use workflow engines only in situations where it makes a lot of sense. In our case, we were using it to control the order in which network components were provisioned, and it was a lot more difficult than just implementing it in code. In his case, they're modeling complex sign-off business processes at financial institutions. So I think it's most useful in modeling business processes in software in the rare cases where you'd want to do such a thing, especially if those processes can be dynamic (EDIT: and need to be validated by non-programmer types). But it's not a suitable replacement for "if statements" when good old code will do. We threw out flowcharts years ago for a reason.