Workflow Model

In this post, we proceed to look at workflow models in some detail.

A workflow model complements the use case model by introducing a work flow focus. While use case diagrams are concerned with who-does-what, they say little about the sequence in which actions are carried out (the includeand extend relationships do contain minimal sequence information). The workflow model focuses on introducing this sequence element into the functional architecture.

At this time, I am hard pressed to produce any sample workflow diagrams for the P&C insurance policy admin domain. This could be due to two possible reasons:

• Policy admin is inherently workflow-less, i.e. policy admin is a set of CRUD screens which can be executed in any sequence
• The Indian approach to business application development is so use case focused, that workflow information is never documented. Workflow information tends to get built into the user interface (as wizards), but never documented anywhere else other than in UI prototypes.

With SOA gaining importance, I am beginning to see workflows dominate over the functional breakdown approach of use cases.

In principle, UML activity diagrams are best suited to represent workflow information. In practice, I have seen vendor-speific workflow modeling tools dominate.

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