What We Learned From Taking Over Camunda 7 Ce

2025-04-29 - The Operaton Team

Inheriting Complexity

When you take over a complex open source project like Camunda 7 CE—without the original development team—you’re not just inheriting code. You’re inheriting a legacy of undocumented decisions, implicit knowledge, and deep architectural nuances. That legacy can simultaneously be a great advantage and a significant challenge.

At Operaton, we faced exactly this scenario. Our goal was clear but ambitious: fork Camunda 7 CE, evolve it into something new, yet preserve the core elements that originally made it powerful. The greatest challenge we faced wasn’t just technical; it was understanding the system deeply enough to be self-reliant, both technically and conceptually.

Why Refactoring Tests Was Our First Step

When confronted with a massive, unfamiliar codebase, one of the most effective strategies for understanding it is to refactor its tests. Refactoring tests helps you:

• Understand the original developers’ assumptions.
• Reveal hidden dependencies and identify unstable or flaky behaviors.
• Determine which aspects are critical and which merely happen to work.

In other words, by refactoring tests, you don’t simply verify the code—you test your own understanding of how the system functions.

Owning the Test Infrastructure is Non-Negotiable

Integration tests in a production-grade workflow engine aren’t optional—they’re fundamental to the architecture. Without robust and maintainable test infrastructure, making any substantial changes feels risky and unstable.

To confidently manage our fork, we prioritized:

• Gaining a deep understanding of the existing test framework.
• Optimizing our Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines for reliability and speed.
• Developing new test cases tailored to the future direction of our project.

Why We Started One Year Before Camunda 7 CE’s EOL

Camunda 7 CE will reach end-of-life (EOL) in October 2025. Recognizing the importance of genuine ownership over our fork, we knew waiting until the last moment wasn’t an option.

We made an intentional decision to begin a full year ahead of EOL to fully own the future of our project. Practically, this meant:

• Forking and actively managing the lifecycle of the entire Camunda 7 CE stack.
• Committing to an entire year of backports from the Camunda 7 CE repository.
• Carefully refactoring the codebase while ensuring stability throughout.

This process has undoubtedly been intensive, but necessary. Without this proactive approach, we would remain perpetually behind, constantly reacting to upstream changes rather than proactively shaping our own roadmap.

Beyond Legacy: Shaping the Future

Our experience reinforced a critical insight: exceptional software doesn’t just come from inherited code. It emerges from understanding deeply, refactoring thoroughly, and consistently rebuilding confidence.

While Camunda 7 CE provided us with a powerful foundation, what we’re building with Operaton is fundamentally different: a free, embeddable BPMN engine designed explicitly for accessibility and broad adoption.

We are not just carrying a legacy—we are actively reshaping it. This effort ensures that what we create meets the needs of current and future developers, projects, and innovations.