Is BPMN Naming Convention Mandatory in Camunda 8 (Sentence Case for Tasks)?

[tejas_pawar]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on a Camunda 8 project, and I’ve come across a recurring discussion within my team regarding BPMN element naming conventions, especially for Activity names and these discussions are happening with every team which i have worked.

Camunda documentation and best practices suggest using sentence case in the combination of object and a verb for naming BPMN tasks (e.g., “Check order status” instead of “Check Order Status” or “check_order_status”). However, in our project, this convention is not being consistently followed.

When I try to provide feedback or suggest aligning with Camunda’s recommended naming conventions:

• The response I get is that “this is just a best practice”

• And that “it’s not mandatory, so it’s fine to ignore”

I also noticed that even in some Camunda examples or documentation, naming is not always consistent, which adds to the confusion please correct me if im wrong @NiallDeehan.

My Questions:

1. Is following the Camunda BPMN naming convention (like sentence case for tasks) considered mandatory in practice, or just a recommendation?

2. What are the real-world impacts of not following consistent naming conventions in Camunda 8 (e.g., maintainability, readability, Operate usability)?

3. How strictly do teams usually enforce these conventions in production-grade projects?

4. Are there any guidelines or enforcement mechanisms (linting, modeling standards, etc.) that teams use to ensure consistency?

My goal is to improve model readability, collaboration, and long-term maintainability, but I’d like to understand how the broader Camunda community approaches this.

Thanks in advance for your insights!

[zee-bot]

BPMN naming conventions in Camunda 8 are documented best practices rather than mandatory requirements, but they have significant real-world impacts on readability, maintainability, and Operate usability. I found the following relevant resources:

• Naming BPMN elements - Official guide on sentence case and object+verb conventions
• Creating readable process models - Why labels are critical for model clarity
• Custom lint rules - Enforcement mechanisms for Desktop Modeler
• Fix problems in your diagram - Real-time linting in Web Modeler
• Integrate Web Modeler into CI/CD - Pipeline enforcement with bpmnlint
• Naming technically relevant IDs - Technical ID conventions and their importance

Does this help? If not, can anyone from the community jump in?

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Hints: Use the Ask AI feature in Camunda’s documentation to chat with AI and get fast help. Report bugs and features in Camuda’s GitHub issue tracker. Trust the process.

[zambrovski]

There is no mandatory conventions, but it is a good idea to follow some basic conventions and principles during modeling. An excellent read on that is a book from Bruce Silver “BPMN Method and Style” which is comparable to Clean Code from Uncle Bob written for the software developers.

It is a very good read and after reading it, you will hopefully have a good idea how your own company convention should look like.

Those can be used in linting tools (e.g. Camunda Modeler supports custom linting)

[tejas_pawar]

Still thinking about few things like if Camunda is suggesting us to follow few best practices then why in many demos or in the their documentation they are not following it . Naming convention is something which is part of BPMN 2.0 Standards so we can assume it should maintain by all tools or software.

can somebody give me clear answer for few questions in my head

1. What are the real-world impacts of not following consistent naming conventions in Camunda 8 (e.g., maintainability, readability, Operate usability)?

2. How strictly do teams usually enforce these conventions in production-grade projects?