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I'm making a project that needs to break some big workflows into pieces and I need to know how many possible flows does the Workflow (that I have "inputed") before has.

Does anyone know any software that can tell me that?

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  • Unless it's severely limited (it's not possible to go back, there are very few decision branches, etc.) the answer to the question of how many possible paths exist through a workflow is "an infinite number". Software to analyze workflows would probably consider back/forward loops as a single piece no matter how many times they were called even though multiple back/forward actions could expose a memory leak.
    – Kate Paulk
    Nov 17, 2015 at 15:49
  • Yep.. It makes some sense! Thanks for answering! Nov 17, 2015 at 16:21
  • Workflow is a directed graph. For simplicity you can assume it is acyclic, so enumerating all possible test paths is like generating all paths in DAG: mathoverflow.net/questions/105330/…. Obviously, like Kate Paulk said, real workflow may contain cycles, but again, you can found on only certain nodes/edges in a graph, limit number of cycles to 1, etc.
    – dzieciou
    Nov 17, 2015 at 18:50

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Although the technical answer to your question is no, there are some methods which help you limit the number of scenarios you need to cover to provide suitable coverage.

I particularly like the Pairwise methodology

Luckily there is a (no longer free) tool called Hexawise that helps you make sense of it without a mathematics degree!

A particularly simple example is testing Credit Cards. This method will help you formulate the minimum numbers of tests to test each variation of card available.

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  • Can u send me a message so we can discuss a bit? Thanks! Nov 18, 2015 at 15:17
  • feel free, or better yet, if you have a general question add a new one onto stack and maybe the discussion will prove helpful to others too :)
    – ECiurleo
    Nov 19, 2015 at 11:50

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