Control flow is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. It's like the GPS directions for your code, telling it which way to go and when, except instead of leading to your Aunt Mildred's house it leads to a mountain of technical debt and a weekend spent debugging.

How to use it in a sentence

• I was up until 3am last night untangling the spaghetti control flow in the legacy codebase I inherited from the last engineer, who apparently thought 'if statements' were going out of style.

• My PM keeps asking why the new feature isn't done yet, but maybe if the control flow in this app wasn't more convoluted than Facebook's privacy settings, I'd have shipped it already!

If you actually want to learn more...

• Continuous Flow: An approach to scheduling work that's like the software equivalent of "just keep swimming".

• Patterns for Managing Source Code Branches: Because sometimes you need to branch your code more than a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

• Workflows of Refactoring: For when your control flow is more tangled than your earbuds after 30 seconds in your pocket.

Note: the Developer Dictionary is in Beta. Please direct feedback to skye@statsig.com.