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Stop hard-coding business rules


By David Rubinstein


 David Rubinstein
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August 15, 2011 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Memo to developers: Stop hard-coding business rules into applications. Use business rules engines instead.

That’s the word from Forrester Research in its July overview of business rules platforms. Author Mike Gualtieri (who wrote the report with John R. Rymer) explained that in today’s world, application changes occur more frequently and the timeframe to make those changes has shrunk.

“When the business rules—we used to call it business logic, that might be in a stored procedure—is programmed in code, it takes longer to find, or isn’t coded in a consistent manner,” Gualtieri said. “It’s more efficient and easier to change [the business rule] if it’s stored in a rules engine than in COBOL or Java code.”

Part of the disconnect between development teams and business process management and business rules engine suppliers is that the latter group traditionally has targeted business users as their customers. The pitch has been that businesspeople shouldn’t have to bother developers to change a business rule, or that these are tools aimed at tech-savvy, do-it-yourself businesspeople. To a developer’s ear, though, it sounds like a toy, something less than a full-blown development environment. A mere trifle, if you will.

But Gualtieri argued that if a tool can make changing business rules on the fly easy for businesspeople, it can make that task easier for developers too. And he went on state that developers can differentiate themselves from their peers and colleagues by talking about business process management, and learning the ins and outs of these tools.

“People think development is just about coding,” Gualtieri said. “Even with a tool like [a BPM suite or rules engine], businesspeople don’t get it at all. They don’t know how to design and integrate a workflow, for example. Or they get stuck with data access, or don’t know how to design forms or databases, or don’t think of scale. Developers can use these tools and be more productive, so long as they don’t use C# or Java as a default for development” of business rules.


Related Search Term(s): business developers, business rules

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