Drools 6 and DSL for Business Analysts

Though not required, programming skills in any language strongly recommended (SQL, Java, C#, VBA, etc...)

This 3 days course is aimed to introduce Drools 6 to Business Analysts responsible for writing tests and rules.

This course focuses on creating pure logic. Analysts after this course can writing tests and logic which then can be further integrated by developers with business applications.

Short introduction to rule engines

1. Short history or Expert Systems and Rules Engine
2. What is Artificial Intelligence?
3. Forward vs Backward chaining
4. Declarative vs procedure/oop
5. Comparison of solutions
6. When to use rule engines?
7. When not to use rule engines?
8. Alternatives to rule engines

KIE

1. Declarative vs Traditional Fact Model
2. Executing simple rules with simple tests
3. Authoring Assets
4. Decision tables
5. Rule Templates
6. Guided rule editor
7. Testing, limits and benefits
8. Developing simple process with rules

Writing rules in Eclipse

1. Stateless vs Stateful sessions
2. Selecting proper facts
   • Basic operators and Drools specific operators)
   • Basic accumulate functions (sum, max, etc...)
   • ​Intermediate calculations
3. Inserting new facts
4. Exercises (lots of them)

Ordering rules with BPMN

• Salience
• Ruleflow vs BPMN 2.0
• Executing ruleset from a process
• Rules vs gateways
• Short overview of BPMN 2.0 features (transactions, exception handling)
• Comprehensive declarative business logic in Drools

Domain Specific Languages (DSL)

• Creating new languages
• Preparing DSL to be used by manages
• Basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) with DSL
• Strategies for writing DSL from rules
• Strategies for writing rules from DSL written by analysts

Unit testing

1. Test strategies (test per case or per rule)
2. Executing test automatically