James Taylor's Decision Management

Jerome had a nice piece over on his blog this week - Software Development Life Cycle for BR-BPEL application - where he discussed the SDLC as it applies when using agile approaches, BPEL to mange business processes, a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) to manage business rules and traditional specifications to manage the rest. It is worth reading and I have two observations.

Firstly he shows far fewer iterations based on changes to the rules only than I think it is realistic. Many of the change iterations for an application built this way would be rules-based rather than specification- or process-based. I am sure he did this just to show the various types of iteration but I worry it is misleading. You should get few iterations based on changed specifications, more based on process changes and most based on rules changes. Every scenario I think about works this way - changes in genuine requirements is slowest, process changes slower and rules changes most frequent.

Secondly, as regular readers know, I believe you need to focus on the decisions (the diamonds) within processes and use business rules to manage those rather than simply talking about the rules within a process. I think Jerome believes this too but it does not really come up in his post.

Remember, by the way, that rules are not requirements and that agility is more complex than just making it easy to change a process definition.