The terrain of business rules
is a practically unknown territory to the users who benefit – or suffer
– from their operation in countless decision processes throughout an
organization’s daily business. Yet this landscape of business rules is
checkered with urgent discussions by IT professionals trying to guess
how best to develop value for the business user.
The problem from the technical side is that, as we’ve pointed out frequently, users don’t have time or desire to learn the language of IT:
“However, most business users don’t want to “maintain
rules” any more than they want to “write code”. They want to run their
business better.” – Business User Rule Maintenance
The wiki entry on Smart Enough Systems cited
above holds a list of qualities that business rule maintenance must
exhibit in order to get the involvement of the users, including that
the system should offer the user “a seamless process to go from a task
to changing the rules”. Somehow the developers are going to have to get
the feel of the procedure right for the users.
James
Taylor comments on the possibility of users changing business rules
themselves, through simplified, foolproof interfaces, and in the end
believes that the better solution lies in a refined communications framework
between business users and IT.
“While there is some interesting work in allowing
business users, or business analysts to create their own rules
unassisted by IT, the more interesting area (IMHO) is in better tools
for collaboration between business and IT so that, together, they can
ensure that decisions are being made with the right rules. Everything
from better testing tools and test management to simulation, from
versioning to templates, and from syntax to visual metaphors is
improving in this area. Those organizations ready and willing to see a
new era of collaboration between the business and IT can get there with
the current generation of business rules management systems.” – Forrester, business rules and 2008
Gary Sherman frequently discusses business
rules in his Dovetail Software blog, and recently brought up the
question of whether business rules could be considered as a kind of
Domain Specific Language (DSL), which is a programming language
targeted or used very specifically to a certain end rather than in a
broadly general-purpose way.
Yet he asks, while routines written in languages can be tested, what about business rules?
“If there isn’t a way to test business rules in an
automated fashion, it’s easy to create a rule that causes havoc, and
the knowledge to create them is so high that we don’t let ‘business’
people create rules, then is it no longer a Business DSL? Or maybe its a DSL that business people can read, but aren’t allowed to write?” – Testing Business Rules
Querying the members of the Dovetail forum to find out Who creates your business rules? showed that the days of easy rule maintenance by non-technical people are not here yet:
“Sometimes we have to scratch our heads with regards
to Business Rules, so I would not want to let the end users anywhere
near them.” – Who creates your business rules?
