ways to learn implementing workflow of a software

Question

Hi... How many ways are there to learn implementing workflow of a software? What are them?

Answer 1

If you mean the user workflow, how the user is guided through the software...

I usually use some sort of state machine to limit what functionality can be triggered by the user and what information will be presented to the user in a particular state of the workflow. This way I can concentrate on designing each segment of the flow in its own "sandbox" and decision making becomes a lot easier.

If you do not mean user workflow, you can ignore this reply.

Answer 2

State machines have several variations. One can find other models on the Computation page of Wikipedia.

Answer 3

Usually you do have steps in workflow. Step consist of some precondition (business logic hidden from UI), some user interaction (user entering some data, and doing some “user stuff”), and post conditions. Usually user interaction part has one or more user chosen “exists”, and every exit consist it’s own post condition (usually every user exit has it’s own business logic depending of a meaning of an exit from a step). Exits navigate workflow to next step. Sometimes you can have fully automatic steps (i.e. using some external data source, calling some web service, important calculation, and so on).
If your workflow is simple, you may implement it as a set of classes representing each step, and configuration of steps order can be put in XML. When your workflow will grow bigger, and bigger, it may be reasonable to search for some workflow engine, (discussion of WF engines is I think beyond the scope of this question).
One important thing – steps can be orthogonal, but it is harder to design. If your steps rely one on another, person configuring workflow and steps order must be fully aware of such dependencies (e.g: user address step will probably depends on user object creation step, and removing user object creation step from a workflow, will result in trying to access nonexistent object).