Workflow
A workflow is an organized sequence of coordinated activities, tasks, or decisions through which work progresses toward an outcome.
Effective Conversational AI
A task flow is an ordered sequence of conversational steps that accomplishes a specific user task.
- How it is used
- Guides a user through the turns needed to complete a task, from recognized intent to a result or handoff.
- How deep it goes
- Works through sequential steps, skipped questions, conditional disambiguation, progress cues, and measurement; leaves fulfillment details outside the cake example.
- Examples
- Contrasts cake-order routing with detail collection and compares five-input claim search with a shorter, conditional flow.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform workflow simplification by removing unnecessary questions, preserving conditional follow-ups, and tracking completion and opt-outs.
Lead Developer Career Guide
A defined sequence of organizational activities for accomplishing a business objective.
- How it is used
- Coordinates development work through a documented process that helps teams work efficiently and communicate clearly.
- How deep it goes
- Develops a step-by-step documentation approach and recurring review schedule without prescribing one fixed workflow.
- Examples
- Uses an onboarding guide covering bugs, code review and merging, testing, and deployment, alongside reviews during and after deployments.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform workflow documentation and improvement by gathering team input, writing steps, reviewing regularly, and recording changes.
BDD in Action, Second Edition
A business process is an organized sequence of activities that produces a business result.
- How it is used
- Organizes actor activities around goals and outcomes to scope scenarios and automated tests.
- How deep it goes
- Develops workflow boundaries, feature associations, and outcome-first verification; leaves unknown actor tasks marked for confirmation.
- Examples
- Uses flight finding versus booking and sign-up before sign-in to expose boundaries, dependencies, and verifiable consequences.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via a Journey Map to prioritize workflows, identify dependencies, and plan reusable tests with verifiable outcomes.
Grokking Concurrency
A process is an operating-system-managed instance of a running program with its own execution context and resources.
- How it is used
- Structures concurrent work as isolated, OS-managed running programs whose resources and execution the operating system coordinates.
- How deep it goes
- Explains address spaces, PIDs, execution contexts, spawning, and overhead, while deferring process communication mechanisms.
- Examples
- Uses a parked-car analogy and a Python parent that starts three child processes and prints their PIDs.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Python multiprocessing.Process to start independent child processes and identify them by PID.
Rust in Action: Systems programming concepts and techniques
A process is a running program instance with its own execution context and operating-system-managed resources, including an address space.
- How it is used
- Distinguishes a running program from its software package and places processes among ways to carry out concurrent tasks.
- How deep it goes
- Defines process execution and memory isolation, then discusses communication options without showing process-creation code.
- Examples
- Contrasts threads sharing an address space with processes protecting separate memory, then compares network sockets with specialized IPC.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand when process isolation requires operating-system-supported communication rather than thread-level sharing tools.
Read how Rust in Action: Systems programming concepts and techniques explains workflow →
Road to Kubernetes
A workflow is an automated definition of triggers, jobs, and steps that performs tasks in a software repository.
- How it is used
- Automates repository tasks by running configured code on demand or in response to repository events.
- How deep it goes
- Defines triggers, a job, and steps through a Hello World example, including where the workflow file belongs.
- Examples
- Uses a Python repository and a Hello World workflow that checks out code and runs an echo command.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch by writing, committing, and pushing a basic GitHub Actions workflow.
Think Like a CTO
A defined and repeatable way of organizing work and making decisions within an organization.
- How it is used
- Improves how departments serve clients by making internal work more efficient while preserving familiar practices.
- How deep it goes
- Defines workflows through organizational routines and a spreadsheet example, without offering a formal mapping method.
- Examples
- Compares emailed spreadsheet versions with a shared Google Sheets tracker for client status.
- What you can do after
- Apply small workflow changes, such as moving a shared client tracker to Google Sheets, without disrupting familiar work.
Related concepts
- threadhas part · A thread is an independently schedulable sequence or context of execution within a program or process.
- YAMLuses · YAML is a human-readable data-serialization standard for representing structured data, including mappings, sequences, and scalar values.
- messageuses · A message is a discrete unit of information or data represented, processed, or exchanged in a communication context.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.