Professional Help

BRS RuleTrack is specially designed for managing business rules

When you decide to get serious about using the Business Rules Approach, you'll soon realize that documenting business rules in a Word document just isn't going to cut it. There are so many business rules, and you want to know so much about them. Who's responsible for them? Why were they put in place? What business processes do they control? How have they changed over time? Where in the application portfolio have they been implemented? And so much more.

To answer these questions, you need a business rules database where you can capture business rules and cross-reference them to your business environment, customizable to do it your way. Enter BRS RuleTrack Version 1.0.7, a business rule capture and management facility developed by Framework Software Inc. (www.frameworksoft.com) and marketed by Business Rule Solutions LLC (www.brsolutions.com).

BRS RuleTrack provides a complete environment for managing business rules. You can use the product simply to capture and organize business rule statements. But the power comes when you define your enterprise's business environment to the tool and place your business rules within a business context, allowing you to track their impact across the organization from both the business and technology implementation perspectives.

RULE CAPTURE FACILITY

Entering a business rule is as simple as entering the business rule statement. No other information is required to set up a rule. However, a lot of additional details about a business rule can be captured, such as the Business Topic to which the rule pertains, the parties (people and organizations) associated with the business rule, and what information systems or databases implement the business rule. In fact, BRS RuleTrack supports seven different categories of details about business rules. (See Table 1.)

The Rule Vocabulary facility, which you use to build the term catalog, is the most impressive feature of the tool. After you enter the business statement, you start linking terms to the business rule. The "Show Possible Terms" button highlights in green any existing terms used in the statement. To create new terms in the catalog, simply highlight one or more words in the statement and select the "Make Term" button. Finally, the "Possible Term Wizard" lets you link the existing terms to the business rule. After you complete this operation, terms used in the statement are highlighted in red.

The user can search for business rules by their ID, name, text in the rule statement, or by rule topic, using the standard Microsoft Access wildcard search facilities. A search legend displays the valid type of wildcard characters and what they are used for. I know I'm always forgetting what the wildcard searching characters are and it's nice to have a handy reminder.

BUSINESS CONTEXT AND TYPE FACILITIES

To truly manage business rules, you must understand how they fit into your enterprise. BRS RuleTrack provides the "Six Questions" facility for this purpose. The six questions correspond to the columns in the Zachman Enterprise Architecture Framework: what, how, where, who, when, and why. Through these questions, you describe the topics, terms, reference documents, events, tasks, applications, databases, jurisdictions, parties, change efforts, and rationales about why the business rules are established that provide the business context in which business rules operate.

These business context aspects can be cross-referenced with one another to provide a complete picture of the enterprise's business environment. Once established, individual business rules can be linked into the relevant business context aspects.

You use the Type Maintenance and Business Context facilities in conjunction to customize BRS RuleTrack to reflect your unique environment. The tool supports more than 30 different Type properties used to define business rules and the business context. Although you can't add more Type properties or change the names of those that are provided, you can customize the set of values that each property can assume. Furthermore, you are not required to use any of the Type properties. I wanted to record a Business Rule Type that was compatible with those specified in the Business Rule Group's standard classification scheme. So I selected a Type property that I felt was not useful to my project and assigned values to it that corresponded to the classification scheme that I wanted.

Although you can add new types and business context aspects on the fly when entering their connections to other components in BRS RuleTrack, I think a safer approach is to design your type and business context scheme before releasing the product to your business rule analysts. You will probably want to establish a central administration team to ensure that your enterprise is defined consistently for all projects.

VERSION CONTROL FACILITY

The software provides a basic business rule versioning facility. When you click the "Archive Rule" button, it creates a new version of the business rule. You can view prior versions' rule statements from the "Version" tab. It appears that BRS RuleTrack retains only the business rule statement for prior versions, not the entire state of the rule when it was archived. If other aspects of the rule change, such as related parties or what systems the rule is associated with, there is no way to view those prior connections. In addition, there is no revert function that can restore a prior version of the business rule.

QUERY AND REPORTING FACILITIES

BRS RuleTrack captures a lot of essential data about a business rule and its interactions within the business environment. Unfortunately, getting that data out again as meaningful information is not an easy proposition. This tool does not have a query or report writing facility. Reporting is limited to a few predefined formats. It does provide some selection capabilities for each report, but none of the ones I tried provided the full view of a business rule that I wanted. No "slicing and dicing" is available through the tool, either.

However, the tool's database is available directly through Microsoft Access. So, you could create your own reports outside of BRS RuleTrack.

However, remember that any time you go around a tool's back to access its database directly, you don't want to change any of the underlying tables and records directly through Access.

EASE OF LEARNING

BRS RuleTrack is incredibly easy to learn. Within minutes, I was entering business rule statements. After viewing the Visual Tour presentation, I was entering the business rule details, defining my business context, and was soon ready to customize the Type properties. A Quick Tour document filled in gaps that the Visual Tour left in detailing the tool.

The greatest barrier I encountered was in understanding the terminology that the product is based on, which comes from the Business Rules Solutions' BRS Business Rule Methodology. I am not familiar with this methodology, so the terms were foreign to me. The program doesn't provide a help facility. When I pressed F1 on the keyboard, I got Microsoft Access help, not BRS RuleTrack help. There was no way to position the cursor on a type property name and ask, "What is this?" - basic functionality that I expect to find in any product.

My dilemma was solved in other documentation that accompanies the product. While the tool's metamodel is available complete with underlying database metamodel, entity, and attribute definitions, I found the most useful metamodel presentation to be the one that provides an in-depth description of the Type properties.

Rate This Article Rating: 1 (best) 2 3 4 5 (worst) Comments: Optional e-mail address:

RARE CLAIM

BRS RuleTrack provides a robust, well-conceived environment for capturing and maintaining business rules. It's easy to learn and to use; I was able to grasp the fundamentals of its approach and was populating my business rules within four hours. Few products can make that same claim. If you want to rapidly get up and running with a business rule management environment, you should give serious consideration to BRS RuleTrack.

Terry Moriarty [terry@inastrol.com] is president of Inastrol, a Southern Calif.-based information management consultancy that specializes in a business rules-based approach to customer relationship management and metadata management.