Last time I ran into a business process coded as a state machine in the wild it was this horrible mess of code that no one could understand. After staring at i

Last time I ran into a business process coded as a state machine in the wild it was this horrible mess of code that no one could understand. After staring at it for a while, going through it line by line... finally the lightbulb went off and I was "oh! It's a state machine! I know what they're trying to do now!" Kind of a Neo "I know Kung Fu" moment. Unfortunately, no one else on the team knew/remembered anything about state machines, so my epiphany didn't help them out any, even if they had had the same kind of classical Comp Sci education as me. Naturally, the first thing I did with this power was to leverage it into World Domin... no wait, that was something else. :D What I did with this knowledge was to hassle the people until they gave me a diagram of what the state transitions (or whatever they called them in Business Analyst land) were supposed to be, and then I went back and compared them, and they were not the same :(