Convention Guide

When designing a State Machine, you need to know the purpose. Each State Machine has a slightly different convention.

State Machine for...

Manage users workflow

• When the element name of the State Machine similar to each other:
  • Rename the state as past or continuous tense when it has the same name as the event. However, try to avoid this because not all world languages have a past or continuous tense verb
• For the event name, the name must answer this question:
  1. What is the event? (Answer: pay)
  2. How to trigger it? (Answer: by clicking the button or hit the enter key)
• Use Protocol Transition when you want to explain the lifecycle of some states
• Use guards as a weight when designing UI that adapts to data. In other word, mix it with weighted graphs.

Manage system processes

• Always think about how the system can recover from failure
• Usually, they use self (loop) and backward transition to recover from failure
• Use Protocol Transition when you want explain lifecycle of some processes
• Use guards when you want to make adaptive processes

Creating deterministic A.I

• for deterministic A.I, use Behaviour Tree (HSFM vs Behaviour Tree) or
• shape it as an acyclic graph (no self or backward transition)
• use guards when designing probabilistic A.I (weighted graph)

Manage resources or data

• utilize State Management library or
• rely heavily on invoking/spawning services, calling actions, and assigning a context