In a world flooded with data, more and more companies have realized the importance of deriving insights and decision logic from data. Data science and predictive analytics skills have become commodity thanks to the new wave of education and more accessible tools. On the other side, software engineering process have moved towards being more agile, enabled faster time to market, and blurred one of the benefits of business rules. While building a decision management system, questions have been raised on the importance or need of business rules in such system. Are business rules obsolete? This talk tries to explore the role of business rules in a modern decision management system, how they cooperate with other technologies, and how they could provide unique value.

1. Are Business Rules ?
For Decision CAMP 2014
Kenny Shi, UBER
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2. My Journey
DATA RULES MODELS

3. Business
Rules
Journey

4. Business asked
“I want the changes done… yesterday!”
“I said I wanted X, but you gave me Y!”
“How do I know my rules are working
as expected?”
“What is UsrAddr.load()[0]?”

5. Engineering asked
“Submit a request and we’ll prioritize.”
“How often do you change rules?”
“You can find all your rules on GitHub,
just follow the code path.”
“What do you mean by X?”

6. • Agility
‐ Independent lifecycle of rules from code
• Separation of Concerns
‐ Business owns Business Rules
• Manageability
‐ Centralized repository, transparency, access
control
• Monitorability
‐ KPI, performance, etc.
Business
Rules
Management
System

7. Climate Changes

8. Agile Development
Communication
Scrum teams
Colocation
Daily standups
Sprint Demos

9. Fast Releases
“Move fast and break things”
- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
“Move fast and fix things”
- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
“Move fast with stable infra”
- Mark Boringberg, Facebook
“Move fast and be bold”
- Miguel Velazquez, Facebook

10. Better Architecture
SOA
Separation of Concerns
Loosely Coupled
Everything Monitored

11. Cultural Change
Partake in Solutions
Information Age
Crossover Talents

12. Data
Accessibility
Minability
Data-driven or Expert-driven
Predictive Analytics

13. Are Business Rules Obsolete?
PDLC process is more agile
Releases are more on-demand
Software is better built
Data provides huge insight

14. Conceptual Business Rules
are always there
(regardless of technologies)
How business operates
How decisions are made
How policies are enforced

15. Business Language
needed for
portability
transparency
communication
validation

16. Data Analytics
Rules Discovery
Rules Optimization
Exceptions
Business Dials

17. (Kenny’s) Business Rules 2.0
No-coding Variables
Rules and Decisions Testing
Rules Statistics and Dashboard
Rules Monitoring and Triaging
Rules Simulation
Rules Discovery

18. THANK YOU - kshi@uber.com