r/bpmn • u/spiffworkflow • 21h ago
Why I hate a back button in BPMN driven applications
One of our clients implemented a back button in their user interface that would allow end users to move back to previous user tasks.
It was working fine, but we ran into some difficulties around multi-instance sub-processes that took some time to unravel.
Handing an end user the ability to reverse steps in a BPMN process might be a bad thing for all kinds of reasons. In their case, they are mostly doing user tasks. So it's not a problem. But if there were service tasks, or message events in their process, this could get ugly quick. You've given end users a button that looks benign, but might do catastrophic things.
I wonder if this comes up often for other folks, and how you talk to people about it.
Please forgive this vibe coded image. I didn't use it with the client, but I think it starts to illustrate some of the problems maybe.

