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User's Guide

Business Rules Management Methodology

Business Rules Management methodology and supporting tools have been successfully applied to many mission-critical applications. The following schema describes how OpenRules supports all phases of the BRM methodology:

As a full-scale based Business Rules Management System, OpenRules covers all phases of the iterative business rules development and maintenance process: 

• Rule Discovery and Harvesting

• Rule Automation

• Rule Analysis and Testing

• Rule Integration

• Rule Execution

• Rule Maintenance.

The Business Rules (BR) approach assumes a cooperative work between Business and Technical Analysts and provides business people with control over the business logic.  In the schema above, the green color represents tasks executed by business analysts and the red color introduces technical knowledge.  During Rule Harvesting, business analysts define business terms, facts, and present their business rules using MS Excel and/or MS Word.  Then they select a BRMS system that in most cases provides an Excel-like graphical tool for Rules Management.  In contrast with most commercial rule engines, OpenRules recommends using Excel directly as the delivery Rule Management Tool and not just as a rule documenting tool.  Enriched with a set of Open Source tools, Excel allows both business and technical people to accomplish rule harvesting, automation, testing, and integration using only a commonly known spreadsheet mechanism.  An ability to add rule implementation details (in form of Java snippets) directly into Excel spreadsheets allows rule authors to TEST(!) their rules even before selecting a rule engine.  Adding a Rule Testing phase into the BR Modeling cycle and keeping business people (not programmers) in control dramatically improves the quality of resulting business rule repository.

To see a practical example of how this methodology is implemented, please click here.

 

The distinctive feature of OpenRules is that "everything is real". There are no documents for the sake of documents. Rule spreadsheets are "runnable" and can be tested at any stage of the development process:
 

• The results of Rules Harvesting are presented naturally in Excel and are used directly for Rules Automation

• Automated rules can be executed and tested even before integration with an existing application by using Excel-based test data.

The logic of business rules is clearly separated into components supported by technical people and the ones supported by non-technical people.  Technical people add rule implementation details (in the form of Java Snippets) into the same spreadsheets where business people put their business rules.  Rules administrators can use the standard MS Excel protection mechanism to provide different groups of people with proper access rights to the rule spreadsheets.  Both technical and non-technical users will appreciate the power of this Excel-Java combination.

By providing support for Rules-based Web Forms, OpenRules expands the BR approach by giving business people control over the presentation logic as well.  You may model your rules-based business process using Excel as a powerful web form management tool.  With OpenRules libraries, you can define layouts for your web pages and relationships among them directly in Excel.  A non-technical user can implement dynamic web-based graphical interfaces without any knowledge of HTML, JScript, PHP, JSP, or other popular web development technologies.  You can add decision tables to control complex interaction logic.  In this way Excel can be used to model and execute dynamic web-based interaction processes. 

The OpenRules approach uses open source Eclipse, the de-facto standard project management tools for software developers, as a powerful IDE for rule integration within a Java-based development environment.  Complex Java projects with extensive rules components can be organized and maintained under Eclipse with the OpenRules plug-ins.  Eclipse naturally provides the most powerful version control mechanism for Excel-based rules and related source code files.  Eclipse is used for code editing, debugging, and testing of rule projects.  With OpenRules plug-ins business rules can be deployed as a Web Application or a Web Service and can be integrated with any Java or .NET application.

Note. Does the use of MS Excel mean you are doomed to use MS Windows only? Not at all! You do not need Excel to run(!) these rules. For example, your Java-based application can run under Unix using xls-files as regular data files. Besides, instead of MS Excel one may prefer to use OpenOffice or Google Spreadsheets to create and edit xls-files.

 

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