Agile IT Architecture

Rational Team Concert 3.0 and previous version provide an excellent environment to develop business application using an agile methodology, and global team. I'm working on a project with resources in china, and multiple States in USA. Creating plan, iteration, work items is very easy and make the production and communication between remote team member very efficient. Have a look at Jazz here and the manual here

My silence on this blog is due to the work on my book, I co authored with Hafedh. The book is now available as you can see on Springer site. The book is about ABRD methodology, architecture, best practices for developing business rule application. I will give more information later. Have fun reading it!. My silence is also due to my current consulting engagements with IBM, so I do not want to say anything about my projects. Also I still need to figure out what I can say outside of IBM.... Learning the business policies of my new company...

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, ...

In the last few weeks, I have to work for developing more content of the process track of ISIS and ABRD. I have to study and develop artifacts for business modeling activities using IBM BlueWorks . BlueWorks is a hosted set of applications used by business analysts to discover and model business-relevant content used in a BPM deployment. A user can create elements like Strategy map, Organization Map, and BPM model in BPMN. The tools are simple to use, and give good starting point for business process implementation. Those tools are in the palette of good tools for a process analyst. BlueWorks is more than just a group of tools. It is also a knowledge sharing platform, where users can learn about BPM products and best practices and they can get presentation of successful deployments. It is a very nice environment to learn but also to collaborate. In term of useful tools a user can go to the Business Leaders environment to create the following artifacts: Strategy Map: defining, planning,...