Agile IT Architecture

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.

The purpose of this article is to present an integrated software life cycle for development team who wants to leverage the capabilities offered by technologies such as BPM-BPEL and Business rules management system. Each new business application development is triggered by a business needs to support or enhance and improve business efficiency. Even with an Agile approach, to trigger the project, architect, business users, project manager and project sponsor have to work together during the Inception phase, to define the business case, the requirements and justifications of the project. Once the project funded, the team may work on specification and requirement documents. I simplify a little here because in reality a lot more documents may be produced, but the goal here is to present how those requirements are supported in an Agile way using the BRMS and BPM products and not discussing about requirements management. So let state the specifications are our main entry point to detail the m...

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.

The Agile Business Rule Development methodology details all the different activities to develop a rule set, from rule discovery to rule set deployment and maintenance. We can group the set of activities into five groups. Those groups will be used to build an iterative approach to the development: Rule Discovery Rule Analysis Rule Authoring Rule Validation Rule Deployment The following diagram represents how the five groups of activities can be executed in a process flow using loops to implement short iterations. The rule set will grow following these cycles to get closer to the outcome expected by the business. Figure 1 Rule Set Development Life Cycle In the first loop, between Discovery and Analysis, the team harvests the rules from the business process description, the subject matter expert knowledge, legal documentation, use cases or any other source. This loop represents the first phase of the rule set construction. 1.1.1 Cycle 1: Harvesting This phase is lim...