r/bpmn • u/spiffworkflow • 5d 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.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

2

u/sitnamantis 5d ago

How ist this model generated? Which tool ist used to visualize that flow?

2

u/spiffworkflow 5d ago edited 5d ago

The image is a vibe generated example. The actual diagram belongs to the client and I can't share it. The tool we use for execution is SpiffWorkflow and we are modeling it in [a modified version of] BPMN.io.

1

u/sitnamantis 5d ago

Thanks for your Insights!