In the UMA , an activity is a breakdown element which supports the nesting and logical grouping of related process elements such as descriptor and sub-activities, thus forming breakdown structures.
Describes the blueprint for software development, frequently represented using a number of architectural views. It also contains the rationale, assumptions, explanations and implications of the decisions that were made in forming the architecture as well as the global mapping between views.
A UMA construct that specifies a process as the hierarchical composition of breakdown elements.
Trigger for the execution of a business process. The processing of a business event can be done manually or using software products and applications. Some decisions need to be done on the event for example to accept/ reject it or to initiate some business processes. Those decisions can be implemented using a rule engine technology.
The following list gives some examples of business event:
Representation of the core concepts of a business and their logical connections. The business object model is the basis for the vocabulary used in business rules. The elements of a business object model map to those of a corresponding execution domain object model.
Business policy controls, influences, or regulates the actions of an enterprise and the persons working in it but without any enforcement. The purpose is more to guide an enterprise
Business policy tends to be:
Business policy is the base for business rules.
An example of policy is:" A claim needs to be processed in 60 days"
Formal declarative statement that describes the way business people want their business to operate. Express in natural language it models part of a business policy, it is specified unambiguously, and it can be implemented in a computer system. A business rule is written in a business rule language, in the form of a statement made of conditions and actions that execute only if the objects treated match the conditions. Business rules are packaged into a ruleset before they can be executed by a rule engine.
There are historically multiple definitions of a business rules. For reference purpose we can list:
Below are some examples of business rules:
The claim must be issued before the expiration date of the policy.
The claim date of loss should be before the expiration date of the policy and after the effective date.
If the customer is eligible for a loan then continue the loan application processing
System designed to modify and manage business logic independently from the enterprise application. BRMS provides a way to automate decision making and execute precisely on business policy. Consequently, policies and decisions form the core of all business processes and activities. A BRMS product should include facilities to enable:
BRMS is a method and means to treat rules as a true corporate asset.
A special type of process used to define a stereotypical way of performing work related to a particular subject. Capability Patterns are often used as course grained building blocks to assemble delivery processes.
An encapsulated part of the system that is nontrivial, nearly independent, and replaceable and that fulfills a clear function in the context of well-defined architecture. A component conforms to and provides the realization of a set of interfaces.
Groups together all potential rules that determine one decision. It can be found in a use case description or in a Business Process Map task description. During the inception phase, the project team can build a decision point table to log the potential decision points which need to be managed during the Rule Harvesting phase.
Example:
Any task or activity description which includes mental thinking. Decision points are indicated by verbs such as check, qualify, compute, calculate, estimate, evaluate, determine, assess, compare, verify, validate, confirm, decide, diagnose, process, and so on. Those verbs help the team to extract a lot of business knowledge, including how the decisions are done.
A software component that encapsulates run-time rule processing elements. The component instances provide a "ready to run" business rule application. A decision service offers a business interface with methods. The implementation of the interface is calling a business rule engine.
A decision service component is mostly stateless and simplifies the process of integrating business rules with popular application platforms such as JSE, JEE, and a Web service. In the context of a BRMS application it is also named rule service.
Spreadsheet like, or table view for a set of business rules, where a rule is represented by one row in the table. The rows and columns identify all situations that require a business decision, and specify which action to take in each of these situations.
Columns are conditions and actions of the rule. Color background help to identify which are conditions.
Here is an example of a Decision Table.
Tree view for a set of business rules, where a rule is represented by a path through the tree. Decision trees are composed of branches that have a condition node as their root, and end with actions. Decision trees allow you to manage a large set of rules with some conditions in common but not all.
Here is an example of a Decision Tree.
A specialized type of work product used to define the primary outputs that represent value, material or otherwise, to the client, customer or other stakeholders. These are typically the result of packaging other work products for sign-off and delivery.
Primary categorization mechanism for organizing tasks that define a major 'area of concern' and/or cooperation of work effort.
Primary categorization mechanism for organizing work products that have an affinity to each other based on resources, timing, relationships or general subject area.
The number of labor units required to complete an activity or other project element. Usually expressed as staff hours, staff days, or staff weeks. Should not be confused with duration.
A specialized type of guidance used to include typical samples of the items to be produced, may often only be a partial sample that is intended as further guidance rather than something to be reused.
Facts are combinations of terms that describe what business people know about their business. It connects terms into sensible business relevant observations. Facts may describe the relationships between terms, like an Insurance Policy is a form of Contract, or it may describe the interactions between terms (collaboration).
Here are some examples of facts
General term referring to all types of material that provide additional detail on other types of elements.
Third major project milestone that occurs at the end of the Construction phase. At this point, the product is ready to be handed over to the Transition team. All functionality has been developed and all alpha testing (if any) has been completed. In addition to the software, a user manual has been developed, and there is a description of the current release. The product is ready for beta testing.
A grouping of repeatable activities based on a set period of time that produces an expected set of results that has value. These results may be further refined in successive iterations.
Second major project milestone that occurs at the end of Elaboration phase. At this point, a baseline of requirements is agreed to. Examine the detailed system objectives and scope, the choice of architecture, and the resolution of the major risks. The milestone is achieved when the architecture has been validated.
First major project milestone, which occurs at the end of the Inception phase. At this point, compare the cost to the benefits of the project, and decide whether to proceed with the project or to cancel it.
Defines the primary reusable building blocks or reference materials of the method framework that exist outside of any predefined lifecycle. The basic content elements are: roles, tasks, work products and guidance.
A significant event in the project or sub-project, such as a major decision, completion of a deliverable, or meeting of a major dependency (like completion of a phase).
Specialized type of work products used to describe intangible items such as the completion of some set of activities, a result or state. A key differentiator for outcomes against artifacts is that outcomes are not candidates for harvesting as reusable assets. Outcomes can not have associated templates or examples and are not possible to reuse as assets on other projects.
A specialized type of activity that represents a significant period in a project normally ending with a decision checkpoint, major milestones, or a set of deliverables. Phases typically have well defined objectives and provide the basis for how the project work will be structured.
Describes the assembly of method content in a sequence or workflow that defines how the work will be executed. There are two types of processes: capability patterns and delivery processes.
Fourth major project milestone that occurs at the end of the Transition phase. At this point, decide whether the objectives were met and whether you should start another development cycle. This milestone is the result of the customer reviewing and accepting the project deliverables.
A primary report for understanding the status of a project. It typically consists of a chart showing the iterations in the horizontal axis and the remaining points from the work items list in the vertical axis.
A potential event or future situation that can potentially affect, prevent, or limit a project's success. Project risks may be seen as threats or opportunities.
Describes a standard set of responsibilities and corresponding skills necessary to perform a task or create a work product. A Role is not a job description the same person may execute several roles simultaneously or during the course of a project and a role may likewise be defined to represent a group such as a review board.
Software component used to execute business rule. The rule engine uses two major entities:
A rule engine is executing a cycle consisting of three action states: match rules, select rules, and execute rules until there is no more rule to execute.
The rule engine evaluates the conditions of rules in the ruleset against the objects to determine (match) which rules are eligible to be executed. During execution, the engine collects all eligible rules in an “agenda”.
The object set is referenced in the engine's working memory, which also contains the current state of the objects which lead to the current rules in the agenda.
All objects are examined by all rules. The effects of the execution are to create new data, or to modify existing ones.
The agenda is a logical workspace where rule instances that have conditions matching objects in the working memory are put. There can be several rule instances for the same rule. When all the candidate rule are matched the engine turns to the agenda for rule execution.
One execution mode is the RetePlus algorithm used to match many patterns with many objects, it helps to minimize the number of rules and conditions that need to be evaluated, computes which rules should be executed, and identifies in which order these rules should be fired.
Rules engine is designed to be complete, and ensures that the effects of one rule execution (or firing) is propagated so that everything that can be inferred is done in one run.
The power of rule engines comes from the fact that complex behaviors result from simple rules, this is known as rule chaining. This is a major change in the programming model developer used to have.There is no more static control structure of the program where function is calling one another, rules are "communicating" with other rule only by way of the data. This is a data change that trigger potential rule execution. Rules are not executed sequentially and it is not always possible to determine through inspection of a set of rules which rule will be executed first or cause the inference engine to terminate.Governance is about operating the business well, and includes being able to demonstrate that you do what you say you do, and being able to explain why you do what you do the way that you are doing it.
Rule Governance is covering the processes to manage rule using a BRMS.
Various states the rule will have during its life cycle, from creation, testing, in production to retirement. A rule life cycle is linked to the development practices of the IT team and also to some business requirements. Rule life cycle is an important element to develop the rule governance processes.
Type of project in which you can manage and organize rule artifacts, class path, parameters and domain object models. A rule project needs to reference a java project, jar file, xml schema or web service as execution object model. A rule project represents one rule set but can have multiple rule flows.
A rule property is an attribute attached to a rule and help to add meta-data on top of the rule. In BRMS rule properties are used to manage the life cycle of the rule, attach documentation such as business motivation, business context,... and can be used during the extraction of the rule to build a rule set or to dynamically select the rule in front of a business event.
A Rule Set is a group of rules that is executed as an aggregate entity. This term also refers to the object that is created when a ruleset file is parsed to instantiate an engine. Rule artifacts include all of the elements from a rule project that you can put into a Rule Set like decision tables, decision tree, rules.
Oriented graph composed of rule tasks nodes and decision nodes, which is used to control and order the execution of rule artifacts. It can be created graphically using the Ruleflow Editor.
A ruleflow can be seen as a business process, but it is not a complete one. When designing a business process type of application is quite often that some sub flow of the business process model will be mapped to a ruleflow. But a rule flow is for the execution logic of the rule set not of a process.
The boundaries for inclusions and exclusions that define the depth and breadth of the project. Example of areas for consideration are included functionality, affected organizations, lifecycle phases performed, included and excluded deliverables, involved geographic areas, and so on.
Defines a unit of work that needs to be done in order to transform inputs into outputs through a series of steps performed by one or more roles independent of a particular work breakdown structure (WBS).
Term references a business concept used in daily business operations. It can be one or more words, nouns. They are often found in different departments and refer to the same business concept from a different perspective: they are synonyms. A term may describe business concept which will be mapped to a class and a characteristic of a business entity will be mapped to attribute of a class, and sometime a term may describe the way a business object behave, in that last case it will be mapped within method or state machine.
Examples:
A specialized type of guidance for externally published papers that can be read and understood in isolation of other content elements.
A hierarchical structured list of all the project activities, in which the work of the project is broken down into smaller work units to achieve an appropriate level of granularity that ensures that the full scope of work to be performed is understood.
Used to define and describe the items needed as input or created as output of one or more tasks that are the responsibility of a single role. See: artifact, deliverable, outcome.