DEVOPSdigest

IBM announced a new experimental capability on Bluemix, IBM's Cloud platform, which gives developers of varying skill sets the ability to create apps that can instantly personalize a user’s experience – without the need to write complicated code.

The new service, IBM Decision Composer, helps developers to graphically model the data and logic which drives and shapes decisions within an app. These models take the place of code, allowing developers to use data to test multiple business scenarios and their outcomes, and then deploy and automate specific decisions directly into operations. These decisions could range from the pricing of a product to how a customer-facing app is personalized to each user.

For instance, if a customer is entitled to a discount based on multiple criteria, such as status, location, age, or loyalty, this logic can be very complicated to change or update because it is likely embedded directly into application code. With Decision Composer, the data and logic used to determine a discount can be modeled and changed without involving a complex IT process, giving developers the agility to more quickly respond to changes and to develop much more intuitive apps.

Decision Composer is a new part of IBM’s Business Rules service on IBM Cloud, which helps developers to capture, automate and govern frequent and repeatable business decisions.

Building on IBM’s experience in designing decision management tools, Decision Composer features:

- An interactive and user-centric web interface to define decision-driving data and logic.

- A cloud-based modeling application, eliminating the need for any installation or local storage before beginning to model and test decisions.

- A comprehensive template to bring together all elements needed to model a decision, including data; visual diagrams to describe high level decision structure; and business rules and decision tables which define core parts of a decision’s logic.

- The ability to test and deploy decisions on a larger scale.

Decision Composer is inspired by the Decision Model and Notation standard (DMN), which is specifically devoted to describing and modeling repeatable decisions.

This tool is now available as an experimental service on Bluemix and accessible from the Business Rules service. IBM is aiming to gather feedback from the decision modeling community around Decision Composer, with the goal of making decision modeling as accessible as possible.