The seven-question matrix
Ask every candidate the course’s questions; adjectives don’t count as answers.
| # | Question (phase) | What a good answer shows |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Where do waits live, and what happens on restart? (2) | durable state store you can operate/audit |
| 2 | Human tasks: pools, claim race, forms, identity source? (3) | native or honest “you build it” |
| 3 | Business errors vs technical retries — two planes? (4) | routable outcomes + dead-letter surface |
| 4 | Decisions outside code, deployable separately? (5) | DMN or equivalent, with governance story |
| 5 | Timers, correlation, broadcast — and their failure modes? (7) | disarm-on-complete, unmatched-delivery handling |
| 6 | 10,000 in flight; the flow changes — now what? (8) | pinning + migration tooling, or named discipline |
| 7 | The 2 a.m. story: stuck work visibility, retention, restore? (9) | queryable ops surface + retention controls |
Snapshot (2026 — reverify rows before deciding)
- Flowable OSS: strong on all seven in your own RDBMS. UIs are yours to build. This course is the evidence file.
- Flowable Work: same engine answers. It adds modelers, task and admin UIs, and an SLA. This is the buy-the-edges decision (10.04).
- Camunda 8: BPMN/DMN answers on its own Zeebe platform. The ops story is platform-shaped — a unified Orchestration Cluster with built-in history since 8.8 (no separate exporter pipeline), and Operate — and embedding is gone. It’s strongest at very high throughput or when you prefer SaaS.
- Temporal: superb on question 1, and questions 5 and 3 are handled as code. Questions 2 and 4 are DIY. Question 6 is worker discipline (patching) rather than tooling. It’s the right answer when no non-engineer ever reads the flow.
The two-week PoC script (run on any finalist)
- Deploy the capstone equivalents: parallel checks, error-boundary fallback, decision step, timed offer.
- Drive it end to end via API only (no vendor console) — the Phase 11 driver.
- Kill the runtime mid-flight; verify resume (question 1).
- Change the flow with 100 instances live; move 50 (question 6).
- Point a probe at it: stuck work, oldest case, dead letters (question 7).
- Have a non-engineer read the flow artifact and explain it back (the author axis, Phase 0.04 — skip for Temporal-class tools and note why).
Score each step 0-2. If anything scoring under 9/12 survives to contract, it’s being bought for reasons outside this matrix. Name them explicitly.