SpiffWorkflow Roadmap — 2024

So what will the next five years look like for our open source Python+BPMN workflow engine? We’ll break it down from the concrete six-month objectives to a far-reaching grand long-term vision.

About SpiffWorkflow

SpiffWorkflow is an open-source application for executing visual workflow diagrams. It is a low-code solution for business users who want greater control over the execution and management of the business processes they are responsible for maintaining and improving.

An example BPMN Process from our demo website.

We’ve been working on this project for five years, taking it from an excellent low-level Python library to a complete web application. You can use SpiffWorkflow right now by visiting SpiffWorkflow.org and clicking the “Try it Now” button. It is also available to deploy locally using docker containers. We have detailed documentation and video tutorials to complement the many examples on our demo site.

6 Months: A Better Overall Experience

We have recently added two talented team members (Lee-anne Griessen and Tim Consolazio) specifically focused on user research, graphic design, and front-end development. Coupled with our existing team, we have set these strategic goals:

• A Better Experience for “end” users — Customers and employees who are starting processes and completing tasks should have an instantly intuitive and uncomplicated UI.
• A Better Experience for BPMN Authors —Creating executable BPMN diagrams should be a pleasurable and rewarding experience. We will add debugging tools, rapid prototyping, LLM/AI recommendations, and tight navigation.
• A Better Experience for Process Administrators and QA —Will this break production? How do you know? The ability to automatically exercise many processes instantly asserting specific outcomes is critical for handing software updates and promoting processes from staging to production.
• A Better Experience for the Support Team — What do you do when dozens of processes are failing in production — how do you repair these processes and get things moving again? We’ll provide new tools for doing this cleanly and safely.

2 Years: A Stable, Sustainable Open Source Project

We are driving towards a robust and scalable software system. Efforts are underway this sprint to drastically reduce database sizes. Long term research is underway around a distributed version. At the same time we are reaching out to organizations around the world, from Germany to Brazil, Mexico to the United States to form lasting partnerships.

Sustainable Infrastructure

• A SpiffWorkflow that can scale to support high volumes with fault tolerance and distributed execution
• A hardened core feature set that is dependable across release cycles.

Sustainable Funding

• Multiple partnering organizations, both large and small, can provide financial support and roadmap leadership. We need to find organizations committed to funding the common software infrastructure that is orchestrating core business processes across many organizations.

Sustainable Community

• Advocates in many locations across the world who are earning their living through SpiffWorkflow contracts.
• Documentation, support, tooling, and funding for Contributors who want to add new extensions, connections, and tooling to SpiffWorkflow.

New features

• A BPM-trained AI Language Learning Model (LLM) that can generate executable process models and provides effective recommendations and completes common tasks as you are building your diagram. “Create a service task that sends this to Slack with a custom message that reads ‘ Hi John, Jane says…..’

5 Years: A Community that defines the industry*

For the last few years we have developed a small but active community on Discord and invited the world in to test their ideas on our demo site. We will continue to seek out expertise to grow a community we are proud to belong to, rather than one we hope to control.

A Python style community.

The Python Software Development Community is extraordinarily strong (the most popular programming language in the world) but also healthy, kind, and filled with champions. We want to build the same community around SpiffWorkflow, and want to emulate these characteristics:

Inclusive and Diverse

• Lots of resources for beginners. Many tutorials and forums targeted at newcomers
• Many Backgrounds welcome — Business Analysts, Software Developers, Managers, Process Modeling Experts
• Many Perspectives heard and promoted— From entrepreneurial business women to community minded leaders in emerging economies.
• Many Locations and spoken Languages — Global reach with support communities in many countries and languages
• A Culture of kindness and a sense of personal connection.

Collaborative and Open Source

• Opportunities for everyone to collaborate on the core library and to promote extensions and libraries.
• A permanent commitment to an open source ecosystem where freedom to view, learn, extend, and enhance is never pulled from the feet of adopters.

Industry Friendly

• Maintain the highly permissive LGPL license to encourage wide adoption within many commercial organizations.
• Provide ways for many people to build a successful living on top of SpiffWorkflow
• Engage and respect the critical role of supporting corporations, governments and academic institutions that place their trust in this community and the software it produces.

Community Tools

• A Repository of shared and reusable BPMN diagrams, call activities, connectors, examples, and solutions to specific problems.
• User Groups, Forms, and Support

Conclusion

We are not the cool nerds. We aren’t 20 year olds, living in Dubai, driving sports cars, our pockets bulging with bit-coin and AI generated business plans. We are the traditional nerds. We don’t have pocket protectors, but we respect a good spreadsheet, we geek out about a well oiled CI environment, and we dream of a world that makes a little more sense than the one we live in currently. I hope some of our goals here resonate with a few true nerds out there, and that you’d be up for working on this dream with us.

* So how does your company benefit from an open community? We answer that question in this article: https://medium.com/p/2e6d7115f668