Posts tagged as:

declarative

Decision Management and software development I – Agile

February 13, 2009

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 [...]

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Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product

January 30, 2009

The Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals had a post on a 21st Century Software Development Process that reminded me of one of my favorite topics – the need for programmers, especially Agile programmers, to get on…

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IBM and ILOG for a smarter planet

January 27, 2009

One of IBM’s big initiatives is their focus on a smarter planet. One of the ways IBM could really use ILOG is to make the construction of smarter systems (or smart (enough) systems) easier and faster. To illustrate what I mean I took some quotes from Sam Palmisano’s Smarter Planet speech
our world is becoming instrumented

Absolutely [...]

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IBM and ILOG – Thoughts on Jerry Cuomo’s WebSphere Top 10

January 24, 2009

Jerry Cuomo has been talking about WebSphere in 2009 and he published his top 10 list on his blog  WebSphere: Into the wild BLUE yonder!.

Business Mash-ups
Business Rules
Middleware-as-a-Service
Rainmaker
Extreme Scale
WAS.NEXT
Restful – Agile
DataPower-lution
POWERful Middleware
Industry-savvy Middleware

He expanded this list with some additional thoughts in an article on InfoQ. Serveral of these – business mash=ups, business rules, Middleware-as-a-Service and Agile [...]

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Hardcoding + procedural code = bad news

January 13, 2009

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 [...]

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Decision Services as agile, intelligent agents

December 19, 2008

Two articles I saw recently (Is SOA Enabling Intelligent Agents? and Three Keys to Enabling Agile Business Services) made me think about decision services in the context of agility and of so-called “intelligent agents”. Clearly SOA, web 2.0 and network-centric…

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If IT can’t get you there, perhaps decision management can

December 18, 2008

Dick Lee had an interesting post titled We Know Where We’re Going, But IT Can’t Get Us There. He made a number of points of which three stood out: Business often fails to communicate effectively to IT Poor process definition…

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SOA is necessary for agility but not sufficient

December 8, 2008

Fred Cummins had a post on the topic of measuring agility in which he gives two ways to assess how well SOA supports agility.
When a business change is considered

how many services must change to accommodate the new business requirements
for services that change, how significant are the changes

It is this second point that interests me. When [...]

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Business Event Management and Decisions

December 4, 2008

There has been another flurry of posts around event processing and event management recently. IBM recently announced Business Event Management about which the architect guy had this feedback, Carole-Ann posted An attempt at demystifying CEP, BPM and BRMS and Eric Roch replied with EDA, CEP, BPM, BRMS and SOA. This is also a topic on [...]

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Using decision management to prepare for an unknown future

November 18, 2008

Recently, Ronan Bradley discussed the challenges for banks in the area of compliance, given the rapidly changing environment. He made three specific points with which I agree and that I think shows the value of a decision management approach for banks and others facing an unknown but difficult regulatory environment in the next year or [...]

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Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams

October 29, 2008

Jan presented on Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams: Towards High Definition Communication. Decision tables are ways to represent sets of rules and there are many ways to represent sets of rules including trees and graphs. Some ways of representing rules are clearer than others and some are better for validation of the rules. You [...]

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The role of decision management in creating (and maintaining) a common vision

September 3, 2008

An interesting article on the role of the business analyst in creating a common vision caught my eye this morning. The article focused on creating a common vision but it made me think about maintaining and developing that common vision over time, particularly of the complex logic in a system. Procedural code does not lend [...]

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Business Rules, Domain-Specific Languages and Models

August 12, 2008

I saw this piece on DSL and MDE, necessary assets for Model-Driven approaches and it made me think about DSLs. First, here’s the definition of a DSL from the article
DSL is a programming language or executable specification language that offers, through appropriate notations and abstractions, expressive power focused on, and usually restricted to, a particular [...]

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A reader asks about business rules in Oslo

August 11, 2008

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards.
First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that application [...]

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First Look – IDS Scheer ARIS Business Rule Designer

August 8, 2008

I had a chance to catch up with Marwane from IDS Scheer the other day and talk about ARIS, IDS Scheer’s enterprise modeling product. The ARIS architecture or platform has currently more than 25 products for enterprise modeling divided into 4 platforms (Strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and 6 solutions (Enterprise BPM, EA, SAP, [...]

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A reader asks… about development, business rules and model-driven development

August 4, 2008

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

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Believe in business rules (I do)

August 1, 2008

Earlier this week I posted Application Development 2.0 in which I addressed what I see as some of the issues with current development practices and tried to explain why I think a declarative, business rules approach is essential. This (and some blog posts around the blogosphere) made me think about the mismatch I see when [...]

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Application Development 2.0

July 30, 2008

Ann All had a post on Agile development brings IT, business together that had the great phrase “application development 2.0″. In the article she mentioned some very worthy objectives for this 2.0 version of application development. Here they are, paraphrased slightly.

Encourage close collaboration between developers and end users
Involve users in quality assurance processes
Don’t use traditional [...]

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Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)

June 13, 2008

Joe McKendrick in his Eye on the Enterprise blog had a post on legacy modernization – Time to Cut COBOL from Life Support in which he referenced a post by James McGovern The mainframe is not evil, but COBOL is… in which James says
that there’s no reason why aging COBOL apps can’t be replaced with [...]

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