Agile IT Architecture

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, ...

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...