JT on EDM

Syndicated from ebizQ
Continuing my response to – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To it’s time to take some of the arguments Alex makes and show why I think his arguments should lead one to adopt a business rules approach. Despite the vociferousness of some of the comments and the tone of Alex’s post, [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by his [...]

Martin Fowler always writes interesting things on his site and this one was no exception: Will DSLs allow business people to write software rules without involving programmers? In it he says:
…greatest potential benefit of DSLs comes when business people participate directly in the writing of the DSL code. The sweet spot, however is in making [...]

Last week I posted Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product and I decided that this week’s posts would be a series of follow-ups on how decision management can and should impact software development. Today on how it should impact/be a part of Agile, tomorrow on Model-Drive Engineering and Thursday on DSLs (Domain [...]

Sodexo provides all sorts of services around food and facilities management. Labor is the number one cost for Sodexo. Each of their businesses, and they have businesses in 7,000 locations, is run somewhat separately. Most staff are hourly, many are unionized and each State has different rules. Tracking and managing hours worked is critical to [...]

Nicolas Robbe came next to give some updates on the product roadmaps. To be honest what he mostly did was summarize recent developments – nothing really about futures.
First he talked about optimization and CPLEX’s 20 year history. With CPLEX 11 they feel they can solve 70% of the very hardest optimization problems – way up [...]

In a blog post about Hardcoding Considered Harmful – or is it? Jeff Palermo said
Oren Eini boldly makes the assertion that a system is simpler to maintain when configuration is hard-coded in one place within the system. Coupled with an automated testing and deployment process, changing configuration can be just as simple and predictable [...]

Dan Rosanova wrote a piece on The SOA Knowledge Gap that made me think (again) about the value of business rules as a way to manage requirements. Dan points out that

“A unique SOA challenge is its need to bring together SMEs from across the enterprise.”

Now this is true but I don’t believe that better management of requirements is the answer. In fact what is needed is a way to turn what the SMEs know into something that can be managed in a repository and used to power systems directly. Working with SMEs to create sets of business rules to represent their know-how not only allows this knowledge to be stored in an executable format – reducing the likelihood of implementation error and speeding deployment and maintenance – it also allows each SME or SME group to manage their own rules. A modern Business Rules Management System (BRMS) will allow different users to have different access to rule sets, allowing each set of rules to be managed by those who know them best or those who “own” them. The BRMS can then be used to package up the relevant rules – typically many sets from many SMEs – into a decision service that can be deployed into a service-oriented architecture.
Because the SME’s can edit the rules directly, business agility is increased because the time from the SME realizing that a change is needed to the time when that change is deployed can be cut dramatically using the rule management features of a typical BRMS.
Dan’s comments about how to gather the know-how from SMEs are all good, but gathering their know how as requirements and not rules is going to limit the good it can do. I have blogged a lot on this topic but check out these two posts on the difference between requirements and Requirements and on how to fit business rules into a software development lifecycle.

Blaze Advisor 6.6 is an incremental release to Fair Isaac’s business rules management system that has just become available. As Fair Isaac has used the product more extensively as the basis for its decisioning applications its own experience has driven a variety of useful features and this, combined with the Blaze Advisor team’s usual focus [...]

Some time ago I linked to an interesting looking research project and the results are now available – Development and Verification of Rule Based Systems – a Survey of Developers. Valentin did a nice job summarizing the results, comparing them to a previous study of more academic projects and drawing some distinctions between academic and [...]