10th International Business Rules Forum

The 10th International Business Rules Forum is coming up fast in October 2007. Scott Sehlhorst and James Taylor will be presenting Getting it Right. Rules and Requirements in Software on Thursday at the conference. The articles on rules and requirements that he and I have been publishing on our blogs for the last few months are leading to this presentation. The IBRF has graciously offered a 10% registration discount code to readers of Tyner Blain. Read on to get it.

Getting It Right

James and I have been exploring ways to write about the interplay of rules and requirements for a few months. When you develop software for a single company, you start by gathering “requirements.” What you gather ends up being both requirements and rules. And there is value in teasing the two apart, managing them separately, and implementing them separately. Our presentation addresses this distinction, and some benefits and means of separating the two.

When you are creating “multi-customer” software, you need to be just as aware of rules vs. requirements, because you need a plan for allowing different customers to incorporate their (specific) rules with market-driven requirements. And for some applications, there are rules based on industry standards and regulations. You will benefit from abstracting these from your core requirements (and implementation), making you more agile than your competitors when responding to changes in those rules.

While geared more towards business analysts (because single-company development is more rule-centric), there’s value for product managers as well – admittedly more for companies selling enterprise software. Our presentation is on Thursday Oct 25th. James is also presenting Business Rules, Decision Management and Smarter Systems, with Neil Raden.

Here are the abstracts of our presentations:

• Getting It Right. Rules and Requirements in Software
• Business Rules, Decision Management and Smarter Systems

You can get the full schedule & abstracts (and printable registration) in this pdf.

Registration

You can register for the conference here (or by phone, fax or mail).

When you register, be sure to include the promotional code from Tyner Blain – 7PGRSP – getting you 10% off registration [Note: we do not get any referral fees or anything]. If you do sign up, or if you are already registered, send me a note (email at the bottom of the page) – it would be great to meet up with readers while at the conference.