Visualize Decisions and Rules

Business Rules and Decisions are typically scattered across an initiative's landscape, both at a specification and an implementation level, making the processes of managing them very difficult - if not intractable.

Using Enterprise Architect, the decisions can be collected together and managed in a common language and format, and visualized in a variety of ways.

There are a number of simple ways to visualize the logic of a decision that make the specification of the logic easy for an analyst or non-technical stakeholder to specify, read or change. The most compelling of these is probably the Decision Tables that express the logic in a set of intersecting columns  and rows. Typically the columns define the inputs and outputs, and the rows list the possible input values and are organized into rules that map these discrete values onto discrete output values. Enterprise Architect also allows the decision table to be inverted such that the columns articulate the rules and the rows list the inputs and outputs.

Another method of defining the rules, which will be more useful for simple situations, is using an expression language. Enterprise Architect allows you to define the expression in a number of implementation languages including:

• Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL)
• JavaScript
• Java
• C#
• C++
• C