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Yes, "Workflow" has to be one of the most abused word in the industry. People seem to use workflow for all of these things: #1 Business process modeling and a
by lewisjoe 7y ago
Yes, "Workflow" has to be one of the most abused word in the industry.
People seem to use workflow for all of these things:
#1 Business process modeling and automating platforms - Camunda, BPMN, jBPM etc.
#2 Assembling together software functions (also called tasks, sometimes) for getting an output data - Airflow, Cadence, CWL is related too.
#3 Moving one entity (bug, document, deal) through different stages of a state machine, until the entity reaches an end state - Sharepoint workflow, Zoho Orchestly, Comala workflows
#4 Orchestrating several apps together for automating something, usually as reactions for events - Zapier
When developers talk about workflows, it's mostly about #2. When business people talk about workflows it's mostly about #1.
When managers/leads of a team talk about workflows it's mostly about #3.
We should accept that Workflow as a word is too ambiguous, and come up with what kind of workflow category the tool belongs to, before branding it as an "one stop solution for all things workflow".
- zekrioca 7y agoCouldn't agree more. I do work with workflows (mostly #2 and #4), but in the beginning of my journey I had problems understanding what researchers were actually trying to tell me, and I always got confused. I suspect that they themselves do not fully understand how ambiguous this word can be..