It's a tradeoff. If you have an explicit finite state machine in which your model can only ever be in one state, then obviously an enum has its benefits. In or

It's a tradeoff. If you have an explicit finite state machine in which your model can only ever be in one state, then obviously an enum has its benefits. In order to avoid impossible states, I'll rely on something like hooks or triggers to make sure that setting one value also updates all dependent values. In other words, setting processed to true will trigger something which always sets in_progress and pending to false. It's not at all uncommon that I will have chosen an enum for a situation in which I thought I was dealing with a finite state machine, only to unearth new domain contingencies that made me realize that I actually need a more nuanced and flexible model. This is why I prefer booleans, particularly the computed/derived booleans when possible (as I mentioned in my original comment). I'd rather have a model capable of capturing the actual complexity of the state than trying to force a finite state machine that might result in a loss of information, even if that means that I'm forced to rely on declarative hooks/triggers to ensure data integrity.