CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unit-testingautomated-testsrule-engine
Danijel Arsenovski
Danijel Arsenovski

Reputation: 519

Rules Engine and automated testing conundrum

Rules Engines are often sold under the premise of making it possible for business people to modify some very dynamic parts of the application directly, without any involvement or programming done by the developers.

In my opinion, putting into production any code that is not covered by automated tests represents a grave risk. I know that many rules engines are actually a rules management environments, including versioning, promotion between environments etc.but what support they offer to BA for writing tests? I have seen some documents where it seems frameworks like JUnit are integrated into the engine and this is certainly not the type or programming that non-programmer would do.

BA can easily change the rule with business engine, but how easy is for him to write a test that can cover it without the help of a programmer? How is the problem of rules test coverage resolved in practice?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2901

Answers (1)

Aravind Yarram
Aravind Yarram

Reputation: 80186

"making it possible for business people to modify some very dynamic parts of the application directly, without any involvement or programming done by the developers."

We have been using a commercial rules engine for over 6 years now. We build template applications that are customized as per the customer's (like banks etc) requirements. The customization's are in the form of decisioning rules which are written in business vocabulary. Below are some of the observations that I've made over 6 years

  1. I've never seen any rules customized on the fly in production by any customer. They all go through proper testing in the UAT environment before they are pushed to production. The whole app is not re-deployed, only the business rules are pushed.
  2. Rules are written by the BA's but most of the time they still need to go through the developers for performance tuning purposes because of the execution model that these rules engine use.
  3. I doesn't know about many open source rules engines but for the one we use, we wrote custom eclipse plugins so that that BA's can generate the test cases in the form JUnits
  4. I think most of the rules engines will provide some sort of a API that tells which rules were fired in the form of audit report for a given request. But the challenge for us was to find the test data that can fire a particular rule. We call it as rule relevant data.

Upvotes: 7

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