State Machine Modeling

Coverage

Define legal lifecycle behavior for a domain object, UI flow, job, integration, or process. Covers states, transitions, events, guards, side effects, terminal states, retries, timeouts, compensation, invalid states, and transition verification.

Philosophy

State modeling prevents boolean sprawl. When a workflow has several flags that can combine into impossible conditions, the model is already a state machine - just an implicit and unsafe one.

Make illegal states unrepresentable where possible. Where that is not possible, make illegal transitions impossible and detectable.

Method