Rolando Hernandez and Fred Simkin are presenting on Visual modeling to define the rules and requirements.

Textual specifications don’t deliver what is expected. The enemy of successful rule based application is ambiguity and the source of the ambiguity is text, especially when dealing with different cultures and different languages.

The ambiguity leads to bad code. Bad code costs time and money.

What works for rule based applications is not the traditional modeling used in software engineering. So to resolve the problem of ambiguity you need clarity.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

There are no visual representation for rules such as BPMN for business processes. So Rolando’s company has been using visual models at customer sites to help put something in a visual manner.

He is looking to the community to see what standards could be agreed to so that Rule systems can evolve. A set of standards that is not product specific.

In practice they have been using this at customer sites and they took some of the models, printed them on large paper (A0 or something like that) and put them on a table in front of the people that needed to be involved. The fact that the SMEs could touch the models, interact as a group, mark the paper with highlighter and a red pen made the review process much more efficient than trying to look at these models on the screen, etc.

Interesting presentation. I wish they had covered in more details what they would propose for the visual representation.