Workflow discovery
Turn business context into
workflows your team can review.
AlphaTales connects what your team knows about the business to the work an application needs to support. Discover the actors, steps, rules, and exceptions together, then confirm the workflows that will guide feature planning.
- Planning contextFoundation, answers, research
- Workflow discoveryScope, steps, decisions
- Feature planningFrom confirmed workflows
Build on the understanding you have already established
Workflow discovery sits between understanding the business problem and planning the application’s features. For internal applications, AlphaTales brings together the project foundation, clarification answers, and completed research to prepare candidate workflows. It builds on that context rather than asking your team to start with a blank process diagram.
The starting point is how work happens today: who is involved, which systems they use, what they pass to one another, and where work waits or breaks down. Your team checks that understanding and decides what the proposed application should preserve or change. A generated workflow is a proposal to review, not proof that the existing process has been understood correctly.
Identify the workflows and decide what belongs in scope
AlphaTales first prepares a workflow inventory: candidate flows with their purpose, main actor, trigger, and intended outcome. Scope and dependency information helps your team decide which flows belong in the first version before generating their detailed steps. This keeps a proposed workflow separate from work the team has agreed to plan.
Consider a leave-request application. Submitting a request, reviewing it, and checking its status are related pieces of work. Review their boundaries first, then examine the steps and responsibilities within each flow.
Connect roles, steps, and the conditions that start the work
Once the scope is clear, AlphaTales generates detailed workflow steps for the selected flows. Review who acts at each step, what they need, what they do, and who or what receives the result. Separate decisions made by people from actions performed by the application.
A trigger explains why a workflow starts. A prerequisite explains what must already be available for it to proceed. For leave requests, submission starts the review; dates and a requester must be present before an approver can act. Once those conditions are clear, check the rules that choose the next step.
Review the rules that change the path
Business rules determine which steps apply and who can act. Exceptions explain what happens when the normal route is unavailable. Review the generated branches against your policies: missing information, an absent reviewer, a rejected request, or a permission restriction may each require a different path.
In the leave example, HR reviews a manager’s own request and covers an absent manager. Nobody approves their own leave. Change the requester or the manager’s availability below to see how one rule changes the handoff.
- Employee requests leave
- Manager reviews
- Decision recorded
The employee’s request goes to their manager for review. Approval or decline is recorded and the requester is notified.
Check the outcome of every path
A workflow is not complete just because the usual sequence looks right. Check where every branch ends, what is recorded, and who learns the result. An approval, a decline, and a return for correction are different outcomes; the last may require work to resume later.
Review the detailed steps for missing actions, unclear responsibility, duplicate flows, and unresolved assumptions. Refine the draft or add a missing workflow before confirmation. AlphaTales supports adding a workflow with its name, trigger, and intended outcome, then generating its detail.
Give feature planning a reviewed process to build on
The result is a reviewed set of application workflows with ordered steps and branches, grounded in the scope your team selected. AlphaTales requires detailed steps for the required flows before confirmation can proceed. That check establishes that detail is present; your team remains responsible for whether it is correct.
After confirmation, the journey continues to feature planning. Requirements can now refer to the actual work, decisions, and outcomes the application needs to support. This page covers that workflow foundation; the full AlphaTales journey explains how it connects to later planning and developer handoff.
Explore your application’s workflows
Bring the business problem and the people who understand the work. See how AlphaTales helps turn that context into workflows your team can review.
Explore it in a demoAlready using AlphaTales? Follow the Application Workflow guide.