Course Description | Outline | IT Home

1. Introduction to Business Rules

• What is a business rule
• When to use business rules
• Roles and responsibilities in business rules development
• Lifecycle of a Business Rule
  • Requirements gathering a rule identification
  • Implementation
  • Testing and validation
  • Deployment of rules and using rules from applications
  • Managing, monitoring and auditing rules
• A case study

2. Introduction to IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules

• The architecture of JRules
• Rule development tools – Eclipse Rule Studio, Rule Team Server and 12. XML Programming
• Rule Execution Server
• Using a rule from an application
• Auditing using Decision Warehouse

3. Introduction to Eclipse Rule Studio

• Rule artifacts - Business Rules, Decision Tables, Decision Trees
• Composition artifacts - Rulesets and Rule Flows
• Auxiliary artifacts - Functions and Variables
• Creating a rule project
• Creating a rule package
• Setting rule filter
• Building dependency between projects

4. Identifying and Defining a Business Rule

• The anatomy of a rule – statements, facts and parameters
• Capturing business requirements in Use Cases
• Identifying rules in a use case
• Judging the quality of a rule
• Reviewing rule quality using walkthrough and inspection
• Identifying Key performance indicator (KPI) metrics affected by a rule

5. Creating the Object Model

• What is the object model of a rule
• Identifying the object model from use case
• Developing the Executable Object Model (XOM)
• Introduction to Business Object Model (BOM)
• BOM to XOM mapping
• Vocabulary
• Domains
• Collections
• Managing changes to the XOM model

6. Authoring Rule Artifacts

• Defining global variables – automatic variables and ruleset variables
• The anatomy of any rule artifact
• Structure of a business rule – definitions, conditions and actions
• Defining local variables
• Specifying rule conditions
• Specifying rule actions
• Decision table
• Decision tree
• Unit testing and debugging rules

7. Rule Composition

• What is rule composition
• Rulesets and rule ruleset archive
• Developing a ruleset extractor
• Controlling order of execution of rules in a rule set
• Exporting ruleset archive
• Ruleflow
• Creating action tasks, subflows, branches, forks and joins
• Rule selection for an action task element

8. Working With Rule Team Server

• Capabilities of Rule Team Server
• Publishing a rule project to team server
• Logging into Team Server
• Smart views
• Project base lines and versioning
• Exploring BOM
• Creating folder
• Creating variables
• Creating and editing business rules
• Creating and editing ruleflows
• Editing ruleset extractors
• Locking elements
• Synchronizing changes with Eclipse

9. Testing, Validating and Auditing Rules

• Introduction to testing, validation, simulation and decision warehouse
• Decision Validation Service (DVS) project
• Creating scenario files in Excel
• Testing in Eclipse Rule Studio
• Creating test suites in Team Server
• Running tests from Team Server
• Creating KPI
• Running simulations
• Auditing executed decisions

10. Rule Execution Server

• Architecture of Rule Execution Server
• RuleApps
• Rule paths
• Deploying rulesets
• Publishing RuleApps from Team Server.
• Managing RuleApps

11. Executing Rules from Applications

• Basic execution model
• The rule engine object
• Executing rules using the native API
• Executing rules using JSR-94
• Building a decision web service

12. Rule Governance

• The need for governance
• The background of IT and business governance
• Developing a rule governance system
  • Identify stakeholders
  • Assign roles and responsibilities
  • Define process to implement policy change using rules
  • Create a team that is responsible for updating this process
• Implementing governance in JRules