The Case of a Graphical Environment Built for a Telco

Empowering end-users to manage business rules: the case of a graphical environment built for a telco Catarina Ferreira da Silva1, Levi Baptista2, Paulo Rupino da Cunha3, Paulo Melo4 Abstract. We present GREAT (GRaphical tool for rules Editing and AudiTing), an approach and a tool for graphical business rules management that we designed and developed. This collaborative Web-based application with rich user interface enables easy creation and editing of business rules. Relevant features are (1) the ability to define templates of business rules with various levels of granularity and of rule elements, which can be further reused; (2) the ability to create configurable user profiles from a broad range of permissions, which combined with business rules templates, suits the tool to users with different goals and levels experience; (3) the automatic versioning of business rules. We validated our approach with real-world business rules provided by a telecommunications company. The easy to use graphical environment empowers the business experts to create the rules themselves, rather than having to resort to Information Technology professionals. Keywords Business rules, graphical editor, Drools, RIA, DRL 1C. Ferreira da Silva (*) Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC), Portugal e-mail: [email protected] 2L. Baptista Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] 3P. Rupino da Cunha CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] 4P. Melo INESC Coimbra and University of Coimbra, Portugal e-mail:[email protected] J. Stjepandic´ et al. (eds.), Concurrent Engineering Approaches for Sustainable 1193 Product Development in a Multi-Disciplinary Environment, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4471-4426-7_100, Ó Springer-Verlag London 2013 1194 C. Ferreira da Silva et al. 1 Introduction According to Jeng et al. (1), business rules are expressions that describe and con- trol the processes, operations and behaviour of how an enterprise, and the applications that support it, perform. Rules define, constrain or validate some aspect of a system through the evaluation of conditions and context of the rule invoker. Busi- ness rules (BR) can evaluate if a certain condition is met to decide if a defined ac- tion should be taken by the system. BR can also be used in support of jeopardy management to prevent potential business failures. A business process management approach based on BR should include a management system of these rules in such a way to facilitate their administration and modification. One of the compo- nents of these systems is a tool enabling business experts (which may not be In- formation Technology experts) to design, modify and maintain BR. Creating and coding BR for the purpose of process automation are not easy tasks. Hence, it is important to provide business experts with graphical applications for BR management. This way, they won’t have to rely on Information Technology (IT) experts and become free from the burden of understanding de- clarative BR languages used by those professionals. In this paper we present our approach to designing and developing a solution for BR management. It is based on a Web-based system with a rich user graphical interface in order to facilitate the tasks of business experts of creating and han- dling BR. Our solution handles the automatic translation of the graphical representation of BR to code interpretable by the most popular open source BR engine (the Drools Expert rules engine). To support the choices made, our work includes the analysis of a set of tools claiming to provide graphical edition of BR and the analysis of frameworks for development of rich internet applications. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a short summary of the tools that provide graphical editing of BR. In section 3 we present our approach to the graphical management of BR, specify the requirements of the GREAT (GRaphical tool for rules Editing and AudiTing) tool, and explain its development approach. In section 4 we validate our work by modelling BR provided by a telecom company in our graphical environment and then generating the cor- responding executable code. In section 5 we briefly discuss advantages and limitations of our approach and we provide concluding remarks in section 6. 2 Graphical Editing Tools for Business Rules Usually, due to the specificity of the processes of defining and maintaining business rules (BR), those functions are carried out by experts in the IT area, instead of business experts. The desire to create a tool which would help this process, making it collaborative between specialists in different areas, and in which the Empowering end-users to manage business rules 1195 definition and design of BR would be really in charge of business professionals is not new. In our research for this project we have identified and compared three tools aiming at providing graphical editing of BR: the Drools Guvnor (2), the Mi- crosoft Business Rule Composer (3), and the Visual Rules WebModeler (VRWM) (4). One major characteristic of these tools is the obligation of using the Business Rules Management System specifically associated with each editing tool. Table 1 provides a comparison of the most important criteria and functionalities that we analysed. Table 1 Comparative table of analysed Business Rules editing tools BR tool Drools Visual Rules Microsoft Business Criteria Guvnor WebModeler Rule Composer Just the BRMS Just the Just the Visual integrated in the Mi- Supported BRMS Drools Rules proprietary crosoft BizTalk BRMS BRMS Server 2010 Versioning Yes Yes Yes Rules verification Yes Yes Yes Rules validation Yes Yes Yes Apache Commercial Li- License Software Li- Commercial License cense cense Web Application Yes Yes No “Desktop style” No Yes Yes Application User Authentication Yes Yes No Graphical representation of the No Yes No business rules Symbolical representation of rules No Yes No operations Graphical edition of No Yes No business rules Drag-and-drop of No Yes Yes elements Among the analysed tools for editing BR, Visual Rules is the one with greater graphics capabilities and more intuitive features. It is the only tool that combines capabilities such as graphical representation of the rules, symbolic representation of the rules operations, and drag-and-drop of elements. The Microsoft Business Rule Composer (MBRC), although having features such as drag-and-drop of elements, has no graphical representation of the rules or of the rule elements. In the 1196 C. Ferreira da Silva et al. Drools Guvnor tool, there is a total absence of graphical representation and rich user interaction functionalities. At the platform level, only the VRWM and the Drools Guvnor are web applications, running on browsers. From these two, only the VRWM has graphics that look comparable to a desktop application. Regarding interoperability, none of the tools allows the export of the created business rules to a BRMS other than those to which they are associated. In terms of licensing, only the Drools Guvnor is open source, with the other tools being associated with commercial licenses. Versioning of the BR is supported by all four tools, though in different ways. The MBRC allows the user to create multiple versions of a project (set of rules), but not keeping any additional information associated with them (such as ra- tionale, author, or creation date). When created, the new version is empty, and it is the user that must copy the old rules or create new rules. The Drools Guvnor lets the user store a copy of the current status of the project. Along with the copy it saves the creation date and comments. In VRWM this feature is not managed at the level of graphical editor, but rather at the Visual Rules BR repository. It offers the possibility of creating a new full copy of a certain rules project and modifying it to create a new version. Information such as author and creation date is regis- tered. All tools allow the user to view a history of versions available and to deploy of an earlier version (roll-back functionality). Our study revealed that, from these three tools, only the VRWM is a web tool with real graphics capabilities and intuitive features to assist the creation and maintenance of BR, bringing together features such as the graphic representation of BR, the symbolic representation of the BR elements and operations, and the drag-and-drop of elements. However, the VRWM tool has limitations regarding its interoperability with other BR tool types, as it does not allow the rules to be ex- ported to other rule execution engines besides its own proprietary system. This tool is also associated with an onerous commercial license. Other limitations are related to performance and fluidity of use, since the VRWM has noticeable wait- ing times when loading and updating rules. Its versioning system is not automatic, which can lead to loss if the user starts making changes without previously creating a new version. 3 The GREAT business rules graphical editor Our approach to a BR graphical editor aims to help non-technical professionals, in the task of creating and maintaining BR, making this a collaborative process between experts from different fields, which is not the current reality (5). It was de- cided to design a graphical BR editing environment with features that allow its uti- lization by professionals not specialized in IT, using open-source

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