Agile IT Architecture

Hi Just want to update the ABRD reference: EPF 1.5.1.2 practice library is available here and contains the last version of ABRD. A published version of ABRD can be found at http://epf.eclipse.org/wikis/epfpractices/ then go on the left to the following folder: Practices > Additional Practices > Agile business rule development.

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, ...

Hi To share with you the ABRD v1.2 is available for download as part of the EPF practices library, instead of dowloading it from CVS http://www.eclipse.org/epf/downloads/praclib/praclib_downloads.php Please continue to contribute and help on its enhancement. I thanks all the persons who gave me good feedback and propose changes that I did incorporate in current release or will do in the future release. ABRD is becoming more and more adopted and used, it is a simple set of practices to develop business application using rule engine technology and so very relevant when we want to use BRMS platform. I'm quite busy since these last months between the acquisition of ILOG and the book I'm writing on JRules and ABRD. I could not blog as I will expect. But stay tuned, there are a lot to come in close months around BRMS ...

I spent two days last week to study the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and business Rule or SBVR specification. SBVR is part of the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) with the goal to capture specifications in natural language and represent them in formal logic so they can be machine-processed. It includes two specialized vocabularies: * Vocabulary for Describing Business Vocabularies which deals with all kinds of terms and meanings. * Vocabulary for Describing Business Rules which deals with the specification of the meaning of business rules, and builds on top of the previous vocabulary. The meanings are declined into concepts, questions and propositions. The meaning is what someone intends to express or understands. A phrase such as "We deny the invoice if the medical treatment was done after one year of the accident" has a clear meaning for a claim processor within a car insurance company. Analysts need to transform logically this meaning into concepts which has...

I will try to do some specific rule analysis to illustrate some of the ABRD concepts. ABRD proposes to do the analysis activities as soon as possible and in parallel of the rule discovery, this helps to identify the issues, gaps, and clarify the rules under scope. So let imagine a claim processing application for a car accident. There are some injured persons who reported the accident claim and with some medical providers who send medical bills to the insurance company. One important step of the rule discovery is to clearly understand the business process. For this example we can outline the basic process for claim processing looks like the following diagram: In brown the decision points that are rule rich, so will be mapped to a rule set. Taking one rule from the adjudication decision point we will build a domain model: “ Ask for an expert audit if one of the treatments includes an emergency room treatment or an ambulance transfer done on a day after the accident. “ Claims a...

There are a lot of requests from colleagues, customers, readers of ABRD to get a sample covering the main activities of ABRD from A to Z. I'm working on a book with a friend of me, which will cover all the ABRD activities in detail, and provide detailed samples. But for the moment I will take a simple purchase order process. There are a lot of samples on the web around this process, but here I'm focusing on a simple version of it. This Order Process may betypical B2B scenario, in which multiple stateful services interact with each other. Two sources for the order request: one online with an Internet customer submitting an order on a Web page, and one using an automatic purchase order issued by a well known authenticated customer-partner. In ABRD using a business process centric approach for discovery – analysis – implementation we start by doing the analysis of the process, then we go to the data modeling, rule harvesting, and service design in parallel like the following dia...

Make Developing Business Rule Applications Easier What: 60-minute best practices webinar When: Wednesday, May 7 Who should attend: Architects, developers, application programmers, software engineers, IT senior managers, IT team leaders, and anybody who wants to learn more about developing business-rule applications Learn about a rules-specific methodology designed for short turnaround times: Agile Business Rule Development (ABRD) When you're building business rule applications, generic software-development methodologies just aren't enough. Agile Business Rule Development (ABRD) is a step-by-step process for developing business rule applications. An iterative methodology, ABRD employs agile software-development values. Rule development is organized as a series of cycles: discovery, analysis, authoring, validation, and deployment. Your team stays on schedule, deli...

Yesterday ILOG Inc announced his donation of his Rule Based Methodology to Eclipse Consortium. I need to provide some explanations on what this donation is about. The Agile Business Rules Development methodology (ABRD) is the industry’s first free, vendor-neutral methodology delivered as an Eclipse Process Framework (EPF)OpenUp plug-in. ABRD provides a step-by-step process for developing business applications using technologies such as Business Rule Management System, BPM, BPEL. ABRD mitigates the risk associated with new business rules initiatives by providing a well documented and structured approach for developing rule-based applications. ABRD allows organizations to avoid using ad-hoc processes or having to expend significant time and effort creating their own best practices. In case you never have a look at EPF, Eclipse Process Framework provides tools for software process engineering to develop methodology. It comes with content knowledge organized in library, and with a tool, E...

Eclipse Process Framework just integrated the Agile Business Rule Development plugin into the OpenUp library. This abrd_openup plugin addresses the development of business application using rule engine technology and Business Rule Management System. This is pre-release 1.0 but it already integrates a lot of content around rule discovery and analysis. I am working on the architecture track and will be able to deliver a new version in March. So any comments or contributions are welcome. Please download EPF and the OpenUp library and let me know your thoughts.