James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this post on Rajgo's blog - Five reasons to use Business Rules to Reduce Maintenance. He discusses a piece by Jeroen on code maintainability that has four key attributes. While the post made most of the key points I thought I would add a few:

• Modularity
  Not only are decision services modular, but the underlying structure of rulesets used to manage the rules that go into a decision provides a further layer of modularity below the service or decision level.
• Consistency
  Again the layer of management below decisions allows parts of a decision to be consistent across decisions as well as for decisions to be consistent. Engagement of business users in rule maintenance also helps ensure that automated decision-making is consistent with any remaining manual decision-making
• Simplicity & Conciseness
  The declarative nature of rules and their management as independent, atomic object makes them simpler and more concise than the equivalent code.
• Self-descriptiveness & Understandability
  Graphical metaphors and a clearer, business-friendly syntax makes rules more descriptive and more understandable than code.

• Habits of effective developers
• Decision technologies and driving agility
• Using business rules to avoid "Write-only" code