A sample to illustrate the ABRD approach

There are a lot of requests from colleagues, customers, readers of ABRD to get a sample covering the main activities of ABRD from A to Z. I'm working on a book with a friend of me, which will cover all the ABRD activities in detail, and provide detailed samples. But for the moment I will take a simple purchase order process. There are a lot of samples on the web around this process, but here I'm focusing on a simple version of it.
This Order Process may betypical B2B scenario, in which multiple stateful services interact with each other. Two sources for the order request: one online with an Internet customer submitting an order on a Web page, and one using an automatic purchase order issued by a well known authenticated customer-partner.

In ABRD using a business process centric approach for discovery – analysis – implementation we start by doing the analysis of the process, then we go to the data modeling, rule harvesting, and service design in parallel like the following diagram outlines it:

During the process modeling the rule and process analysts search for verbs which involve mental processing or thinking like check, qualify, compute, calculate, estimate, evaluate, determine, assess, compare, verify, validate, confirm, decide, diagnose.. to identify activity which has business decision and logic, applies some business knowledge... Those activities should be what we call "decision rich" and have the focus of the rule analyst to discover rule.

Purchase Order Process description

The process is initiated when a customer online submits a product order, or when an automatic purchase order issued by a well known authenticated customer is received on one EDI link. A customer validation step is executed using customer data and product request data. Based on the product data provided in the order, it is checked whether the product is on stock. If the product is available, the price for the shipment of the ordered product is determined and presented back to the customer. If the product is not available, a message is sent back to the customer by email or web page (if still online). This last case also triggers email to product manager to provision the stock for this product.

The total price of the order is calculated from the product price, the customer business condition, loyalty program… and the shipment price. When the charging and the shipment have been performed successfully, the order is filed and the process ends.

Process Analysis

Looking on this process and the description above we can extract the following decision point where business rule will apply:

Decision Point Name	Description
Validate Customer data	Verify the customer information – data present or not, and black listed customers
Validate Purchase Order	Verify there is no fraud in the purchase orders or on a set of purchase order coming over a time period, , verify the data are correct
Calculate Total Price	As the price may account for a loyalty program, marketing campaign, stock level, and other business dimensions, business rules are relevant here to compute the price outside of a simple addition.
Get Shipment report	It may be possible to receive a set of events from the shipment company to aggregate and correlate to the same purchase order so that customer can be notified on a major type of events as well as the internal management team.

A decision point table is an important deliverable of the analysis. It can be built during the inception phase by the team responsible to outline the project high level scope. If it is not present the project team has to quickly develop it during the first iteration of the project.

We will detail the outcome of the rule discovery in a next post.

Book your agenda: May 7 10.00 am PST. Web seminar on ABRD

Make Developing Business Rule Applications Easier

What: 60-minute best practices webinar
When: Wednesday, May 7
Who should attend: Architects, developers, application programmers, software engineers, IT senior managers, IT team leaders, and anybody who wants to learn more about developing business-rule applications

Learn about a rules-specific methodology designed for short turnaround times: Agile Business Rule Development (ABRD)

When you're building business rule applications, generic software-development methodologies just aren't enough.

Agile Business Rule Development (ABRD) is a step-by-step process for developing business rule applications. An iterative methodology, ABRD employs agile software-development values. Rule development is organized as a series of cycles: discovery, analysis, authoring, validation, and deployment. Your team stays on schedule, delivering outstanding business rule applications.

Attend this free one-hour webinar and learn how to:

• Leverage ABRD as first open-source methodology for business rules
• Implement and deploy rules in an SOA or BPM context
• Engage in rule discovery and analysis

Industry First Open Source Methodology for Business Rules

Yesterday ILOG Inc announced his donation of his Rule Based Methodology to Eclipse Consortium. I need to provide some explanations on what this donation is about. The Agile Business Rules Development methodology (ABRD) is the industry’s first free, vendor-neutral methodology delivered as an Eclipse Process Framework (EPF)OpenUp plug-in. ABRD provides a step-by-step process for developing business applications using technologies such as Business Rule Management System, BPM, BPEL.

ABRD mitigates the risk associated with new business rules initiatives by providing a well documented and structured approach for developing rule-based applications. ABRD allows organizations to avoid using ad-hoc processes or having to expend significant time and effort creating their own best practices.

In case you never have a look at EPF, Eclipse Process Framework provides tools for software process engineering to develop methodology. It comes with content knowledge organized in library, and with a tool, EPF Composer, which enables process engineers and managers to implement, deploy, and maintain processes for organizations or individual projects based on the content of the library.



The goal for EPF is to deliver a platform for producing software development practices, how-to, common definition and vocabulary, and processes with task, role, work product and guidelines definitions. Libraries are physical containers for knowledge content, process configuration and other parameters to publish the content as a set of web pages. Method content describes what is to be produced, the necessary skills required and the step-by-step explanations describing how specific development goals are achieved.
Processes describe the development life cycle. They take the method content elements and relate them into semi-ordered sequences that are customized to specific types of projects. They express who, when, what work will be performed.
EPF Composer provides a knowledge base of intellectual capital which we can browse, manage and deploy. This knowledge base organized in plug-in forms the basis for developing processes. We can define Roles, Tasks, Work Products, and Guidances in a hierarchy of folders named Content Packages. All content can be published to html and deployed to Web servers for distributed usage. Finally process engineers and project managers can select, tailor, and rapidly assemble processes for their concrete development projects. Once content is defined you can define the process building blocks, called capability patterns, which represent best development practices for specific disciplines, technologies, or management styles.

'abrd_openup" is a plug-in which extends openUp. From there you can reuse the content to develop your own plug-in. I recommend to extend ABRD without modifying it, so that you can leverage future release of it. If you want to contribute to abrd_openup you can send me email or comment on this blog. I will integrate most of the contribution in each release of the plug-in.
Have EPF fun!.

Agile Business Rule Development EPF plugin.

Eclipse Process Framework just integrated the Agile Business Rule Development plugin into the OpenUp library. This abrd_openup plugin addresses the development of business application using rule engine technology and Business Rule Management System. This is pre-release 1.0 but it already integrates a lot of content around rule discovery and analysis. I am working on the architecture track and will be able to deliver a new version in March. So any comments or contributions are welcome.
Please download EPF and the OpenUp library and let me know your thoughts.