James Taylor's Decision Management

Kirk Knoernschild had a great post on Application Platform Strategies Blog: Increasing Your Agility. I often blog about the power of business rules to improve agility (check out Decision Services and designing for change,Decision Management and software development - Agile and Achieving Agility - some notes after Gartner for instance) and I was struck by one particular comment in the middle of his post:

Look at what we can do to improve the transparency of the development effort. Engage the customer and share the good and the bad surrounding the current state of the system

This is where using a business rules management system to manage the decisions in your system, and the business logic within them, would really help. Business rules are more verbose and business friendly than code so your business users are more likely to understand them, increase transparency. Because they are atomic and managed they are easy for non-programmers to keep track off and it is easier to do impact analysis/what-if analysis, making it easier to see where the system is in terms of completeness. For both these reasons, projects using a BRMS find it easier to engage their customers and get them onside working with the developers to build the system and evolve it.