I am responsible for a team of developers who will are about to start development of a light weight insurance claims system. The system involves a lot of manual tasks and business workflows and we are looking at using Windows Workflow (.NET 4.0). 

An example of the business domain is as follows:
A policy holder calls the contact centre to lodge a claim. This “event” fires two sub tasks which are manually actioned in parallel and may take a lengthy time to complete;

   1. Check customer for fraud – A manual process whereby an operator calls various credit companies to check and assess the potential of a fraudulent customer. From here the sub task can enter a number of sub-statuses (Check in progress, Failed Reference Check, Passed Reference Check, etc)
   2. Send item to repairs centre – A manual process where the item for which the policy holder lodged the claim is sent the repairs centre to be fixed. From here the sub task can enter a number of sub-statuses (Awaiting Repair, In Progress, Repaired, Posted, etc). 
The claim can only proceed once the status of each sub task has reached a predefined status (based on the business rules). 

On the surface it seems that Workflow is indeed the best technology choice; however I do have a few concerns in using WF 4.0. 

   1. Skill set – Looking at the average developer skill set I do not see many developers who understand or know Workflow.
   2. Maintainability – There seems to be little support within the community for WF 4.0 projects and this coupled with the lack of skill set raise concerns around maintainability.
   3. Barrier to entry – I have a feeling that Windows Workflow has a steep learning curve and it’s not always that easy to pick up.
   4. New product – As Workflow has been completely rewritten for .NET 4.0 I see the product as a first generation product and may not have the necessary stability.
   5. Reputation – Previous versions of Workflow were not well received, considered difficult to develop with and resulted in poor business uptake.

So my question is should we use Windows Workflow (WF) 4.0 for this situation or is there an alternative technology (e.g., [Simple State Machine][1], etc) or even a better workflow engine to use?


  [1]: http://code.google.com/p/stateless/

All Workflow Foundation-4 Solutions on Gang of Coders

Total of 1 Workflow Foundation-4 Solutions

To Workflow or Not to Workflow?