Agile IT Architecture

Hi I will share a lunch time slot with Daniel Selman, tuesday 10/12 at RuleFest to present the Agile business rules development methodology, and how to leverage it for your own project. I would love to see more projects using BRMS and rule technology as early as possible in the SDLC life cycle, than doing months of documentation.... I undertstand the SI goals to spend, burn hours on documentation work, but the value is on executable rules that brings value to the business quickly, and the business users being able to change these rules as he wants. Documentation never made good software. Good code does. Good business rules too. See you at RuleFest.

You can find a new release of Eclipse Process Framework, practices library, and ABRD. A published version is available at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epf/OpenUP/published/abrd_published_1.5.1_20101007.zip Still working on the book.

There are two new articles about business rules and business policies on developer work which may my readers. I participate deeply in this paper when joining IBM last year. Most of the concepts are known, and some are part of ABRD. Part 1 deals with terms, abstract concepts and relationships, Part 2 describes techniques for applying the concepts to business problems. Please feel free to comment here.

In ABRD we propose to start the rule harvesting process by looking at decision points. Recently I have a question from a business user, on how to extract the decision point. So let give some practices I'm using. A decision point is a task in a business process or a step in the use case that involve decision to be taken. When looking at a task description it is important to search for mental thinking verb, most of the time there is a set of knowledge to apply to execute this task, which leads to decision. This could be human knowledge or business logic implementation in a software component. The type of decision will most likely be a reject or accept of the business event or flag it for future processing downstream in the business process. The decision may also include some computational expressions to assign value to attribute of the business transaction. Therefore to find decision point in a business process or use case description start by searching for verb like analyze, check,