Agile IT Architecture

Today I would like to present a very nice article in a IT french journal “ Solutions logiciels ”. This is related to sustainable architecture . I’m working with Pierre Bonnet, the author of this article, on this matter, and try to share experiences on BRMS, as one of the corner stones of the Agility Chain Management System , I will try to summarize the main points of this article in french as it is relevant over the world: The IT infrastructure in a lot of companies suffers from a lack of investment to modernize the legacy, which adds complexity when development team deploys new applications. Business and IT managers are focusing in short term ROI putting on hold long term investments needed to build a long term sustainable architecture. Added to these, we can foreseen three layers of IT staff: the senior with their knowledge of the current legacy systems and the business requirements, the intermediate layer with people skilled in client/server and EAI technologies, and the yo...

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...

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...

I will publish this month the Agile Business Rule Development plug-in for the Eclipse Process Framework. This plugin presents a pragmatic approach to the development of a Business Rule Application using Rule Engine and Business Rules Management System (BRMS) technology such as ILOG JRules , Rules for .Net or any other Rule Engine and BRMS on the market. Business rules are an expression of business policy in a form that is both comprehensible to business users and executable by a rule engine. From a business perspective, a business rule is a precise statement that describes, constrains, or controls some aspect of the business. Let’s illustrate this with a simple example coming from the lending industry. The following business policy can be established to limit the purchase of loans by a bank or lender: Only prime loans are eligible for purchase This policy may be split into two rules, one defining what a prime loan is and the second taking the decision on purchasing i...