My job on the ROAD Services Team at InRule involves connecting with a variety of InRule users, evaluating their business requirements, and turning those requirements into functional rules in irAuthor. Over the years, I’ve run across a variety of interesting...
In computer terms, what is nothing, and why should you care? Even for rule authors with a development background, a quick review of how InRule handles “nothing” values can be useful for those occasions when you need to know if you have a value. In this post, I’ll...
A couple years ago I wrote a blog post that highlighted an excellent irAuthor method which adds a member to a collection of messages in a ruleset using a Vocabulary template. While that blog post and that pattern is highly useful even to this day, I came across a...
In irAuthor, as with most software with structured logic, when you decide to implement a new application or a new addition to an existing application, you must make several decisions: What will my rules do? What are the intended inputs and outputs of these rules? Are...
In the world of business process management, Excel workbooks often serve as a treasure trove of decision logic and operational guidelines. Harvesting business rules from Excel is a critical step towards automating processes, enhancing decision-making, and ensuring...
Testing rules in a rule engine is not quite the same as testing code. Verifying correct behavior and results in simple rule applications can be as simple as a quick glance at irVerify and the Rule Engine Feedback tab. But more complicated rule applications take the...
You’d Like to Say Yes to a Rule Engine: Here’s How to Prepare for Success in Your Implementation It can be exciting to envision the day when the functional business logic currently trapped in your code is now implemented and managed by subject-matter experts (SMEs) in...
In the Midwest, the end of summer traditionally represents the “harvest season,” when fully-grown crops are harvested from a farmer’s fields. While the concept of “rule harvesting” borrows metaphorically from the notion of producing...
Beyond the basics of PEMDAS for individual calculations, how does the “order of operations” work in a rule application? Here’s a quick blog post about how to understand order of operations in InRule®. Troubleshooting: Begin at the End The first thing to know about the...
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. Questions are what matter. –Pablo Picasso While computers obviously aren’t “useless,” Picasso’s point is a good one: knowing the right questions to ask can often turn out to be of more importance than...
