DMN Method and Style: The Practitioner's Guide to Decision Modeling with Business Rules

by Bruce Silver, Aaron Sayles (Contributor)

This title is out of date.  Please buy the Second Edition.  Business Decision Management is a technology-assisted practice of defining, analyzing, and maintaining the decision logic that drives interactions with customers, suppliers, and employees. For many years, subject matter experts created text-based "requirements" and handed them over to programmers for implementation on a Business Rule Engine. The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) now offers a better decision logic precisely defined and maintained by subject matter experts themselves, using business-friendly graphical models that can be automatically validated for completeness and consistency. Since DMN is an industry standard, the meaning of a decision model does not depend on the tool used to create it or some consultant's methodology. It's defined by a specification. And best of all, DMN models are directly executable, so What You See Is What You Get. "DMN Method and Style" is your guide to the new standard and to the features and benefits of Business Decision Management. It explains not only the shapes and symbols used to describe end-to-end decision logic in a Decision Requirements Diagram (DRD), but how to properly decompose the top-level decision into a network of supporting decisions and input data. It also shows you how to define the detailed logic of each decision in the diagram using decision tables, literal expressions, and reusable logic blocks called business knowledge models. Like its predecessor "BPMN Method and Style", the book suggests best practices, in the form of style rules and a modeling methodology, for capturing the end-to-end decision logic in a way that is complete, consistent, and clear from the printed DRD and tabular expressions alone.

332 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2016

Reviews

[Peter De Kinder · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Decision Modeling Notation (DMN) is an industry standard (OMG) that was developed agnostic of existing and/or technologies. It allows for any vendor to adapt his product to adhere to this standard without restrictions, and serves as an executable syntax that can be easily integrated in BPMN and CMMN models in order to enrich them. The DMN specification is summed up by three features:
* Decision Tables: Tabular representations of logic that make up a decision rule.
* Decision Requirement Tables (DRD): Hierarchical ordering of multiple business rules to represent an end-to-end business decision.
* Friendly Enough Expression Language (FEEL): A pseudo-code expression language allowing for the introduction of functions (similar to those in for example Microsoft Excel).

Similar to his earlier work for BPMN, Bruce Silver published this book in 2016 to give DMN the same treatment: Explaining the different components that make up the notation, as well as showcase how to design different scenarios in a proper manner. As he exclaimed about BPMN Method &Style: “It’s not because you know all the words of a language that you can write a proper sentence”. Since then, a second edition was already released. But this review is still about the first edition.

The main focus for DMN is not to model strategic decisions (such as for example innovation management approaches), but rather the decisions (calculations, approvals, compliance checks…) that happen every day within the operational scope of an organization. These decisions are rooted in business considerations, not technical ones. These decisions are the ones typically written down in business requirements documents to be handed over to the implementation team who proceeds to code the resulting rules or input them in a Business Rules Engine (BRE).

More detail: https://evolute.be/reviews/dmn.html