Best Practices

The Camunda Best Practices distill Camunda's experience with BPMN, DMN, and agentic orchestration on the Camunda toolstack, drawing on consulting engagements, community feedback, and customer projects. They offer a blend of conceptual and practical guidance, generalized from current project experience. They are not definitive: learning is ongoing, and how well a practice applies depends on your situation.

Note that Camunda extends the same guarantee to Best Practices as to the core product. However, Camunda cannot ensure the absolute accuracy or timeliness of the information provided, and disclaims any liability for damages resulting from applying these recommendations.

Project management

Following the customer success path

Follow certain steps and Best Practices when evaluating and introducing process automation to help make it a success.

Doing a proper POC

When evaluating your process automation approach, a POC helps check if the method and technology suit your needs.

Architecture

Data flow

Understand how data moves through Camunda 8.8+ and why it matters when sizing your environment.

Deciding about your stack

Our greenfield stack recommendation is a result of extensive discussions and evaluations. While not the only option, it is a solid choice if there are no specific reasons to choose an alternative.

🗃️ Size your environment

3 items

Understanding human task management

Use Camunda task management features or implement your requirements in a generic way for readable models.

Development

Connecting the workflow engine with your world

To sketch the basic architecture of your solution, learn how to connect the Zeebe workflow engine with your application or remote system.

Service integration patterns with BPMN

When integrating systems and services, you can choose between various modeling possibilities in BPMN.

Writing good workers

Service tasks within Camunda 8 require you to set a task type and implement job workers who perform whatever needs to be performed.

Dealing with problems and exceptions

Take a closer look at understanding workers, handling exceptions on a technical level, leveraging retries, using incidents, and more.

Handling data in processes

When using Camunda, you have access to a dynamic map of process variables, which lets you associate data to every single process instance.

Routing events to processes

To start a new process instance or to route a message to a running instance, choose the appropriate technology option to do so.

Testing process definitions

Test your executable BPMN processes as they are software. If possible, do automated unit tests with a fast in-memory workflow engine.

Local development with element templates and Camunda 8 Run

Learn how to use Camunda 8 Run with element templates in your local development environment.

Modeling

Creating readable process models

Create visual process models to better understand, discuss, and remember processes so models are easy to read and understand.

Naming BPMN elements

Name all elements in your BPMN diagrams, like activities, events, and gateways, by focusing on the business perspective.

Naming technically relevant IDs

For executable flows, properly name all relevant technical element IDs, like BPMN IDs, in your BPMN diagrams.

Modeling beyond the happy path

Model the happy path before collecting problems and exceptions, prioritizing them, and introducing them incrementally.

Modeling with situation patterns

Document patterns that share common characteristics and find a satisfying solution for modeling them.

Building flexibility into BPMN models

Sometimes we need ways to build flexibility into process models to deal with operational problems or to allow for humans to intervene.

Choosing the DMN hit policy

Hit policies describe different ways (standardized by DMN) to evaluate the rules contained in a decision table.

Choosing the resource binding type

Choose the resource binding type and understand the differences between 'latest' and 'deployment' binding for linked resources.

Operations

Versioning process definitions

For real-life applications, it's crucial to understand how Camunda deals with evolving process definitions by means of versioning.

Reporting about processes

The Camunda engine automatically collects audit information about historical process or instances for users to leverage and generate relevant reports.

CI/CD guidelines

Element templates at scale

Learn how to provision element templates at runtime and make them available at design time across your Web Modeler organization and Desktop Modeler.

Agentic orchestration

Processes that hand a step to an AI agentAI agentAn addressable execution of an LLM-driven loop with shared memory context across iterations. An agent runs a loop where the model decides what to do next, which tools to invoke, and when to stop. run on the same engine, variables, and audit trail as fully deterministic ones, so the practices above still apply. For specific guidance on designing, tuning, and evaluating agents, see the agentic orchestration documentation:

• Design and architecture covers deciding where an agent belongs in a process, blending deterministic and AI-driven steps, and guardrail patterns such as human-in-the-loop escalation.
• Model recommendations covers writing tool descriptions, managing the context window, sanitizing tool output, and prompting.
• Choose the right model covers benchmarking candidate LLMs against your own requirements.
• Evaluate AI agents covers testing non-deterministic flows, monitoring agents in Operate, and analyzing token and tool usage in Optimize.