In every project I’ve seen where someone has evangelized a visual workflow designer (bar none), the overriding argument has been that “power users”, can “manage” the business workflows.
In every project the business users have no interest in “managing” business workflows, so the developers that built the tool end up having to use the tool for them, implementing their business use cases.
Developers are much more comfortable with code. You cannot easily unit test visual workflow designers. You cannot easily version or put visual workflow designs into source control.
Whenever I see one of these projects I run screaming in the opposite direction.
Locode in general is an anti pattern. I’m specifically looking at Microsoft Dynamics and Power Apps, aka. Microsoft Access Online
I would like to be able to upvote this post 100 times.
Absolutely agree! I’ve seen the same thing happen. The idea that “power users” will manage workflows sounds great on paper, but in reality, it always falls back on developers. And once things get even slightly complex, I end up writing custom scripts anyway because the visual tools just can’t handle it cleanly.
At that point, you’re stuck using a tool that’s harder to debug, test, or version and still coding on the side. Totally with you on this being an anti-pattern in most serious use cases.