Skip to main content

Human review

When you hear "review", you may picture watching over what an agent does and stopping it when something looks wrong. A review step is not that kind of mechanism.

This page explains what a review step decides. Where to put them and who to make a reviewer are in the Review Guide.

Review steps belong to workflows. A cycle cannot have one. How to bring a person in on a cycle is covered in the Design Guide.

A review step decides whether the work goes on​

What a review step decides is whether this work may go on to the next step. A reviewer looks at what is up for review and chooses one of three: advance to the next step, send it back, or reject it. On a review step with “Destination options”, advancing also means choosing a destination among the later steps.

It is not a mechanism for stopping an agent part-way. Nothing interrupts an agent while it is running. The one who decides is a reviewer, though once the deadline has passed the system may process it instead.

Even if you name several reviewers, the first answer settles it. It is not a mechanism that waits for everyone to agree.

The review method changes what it means​

There are two review methods, and which one you choose changes the part people play.

Stop and wait for a decision does not go on until a person decides. What happens after the deadline is set separately, though, so it can also advance, send back or reject on its own without the reviewer having answered.

Notify and proceed after the deadline lets the reviewer decide up until the deadline, and then advances to the next step on its own. It is for a step a person may look at, and that does not stall if they do not.

What happens once the deadline passes depends on the combination of the review method and the deadline settings. The combinations are covered in the Review Guide.

Automatic processing at the deadline is not approval​

When it advanced on its own after the deadline, no reviewer answered. The record shows that it was processed at the deadline rather than decided by a person.

Confusing the two leads you to misread the figures. The counts of send-backs and rejections, and the time spent waiting for review, include automatic processing at the deadline. How to read the records is covered in Records and metrics.