posted on 2006-09-01, 00:00authored byAnthony Tomasic, R. Martin McGuire, Brad Myers
Workflow and data integration engineering are complex and expensive activities. Adding a new
workflow to a system often requires lengthy and repeated rounds of software engineering. The time
and cost of this work creates an undesirable barrier between users and new system functionality.
In the process of creating new workflow, developers frequently reproduce the queries and updates
already present in other parts of the system. For example, many IT organizations have a formsbased
implementation that allows a user to perform the steps of a workflow by hand. This form
system can be leveraged in the creation of workflow procedures. In this paper we describe a system,
Workflow By Example (WbE), where developers create workflows (or data integration queries)
by demonstrating a workflow to the system. WbE observes the demonstration and automatically
constructs a corresponding general workflow script. A performance evaluation of WbE shows that
its learning algorithm scales well, and a user study show that if a batch update contains more than
8 form changes, WbE is more efficient to use than manual updates.