Whether you like it or not, your business decision models will contain bugs like regular software always does. They will fail to produce expected results for certain inputs and under different unforeseen circumstances. As a result, their authors, who are usually business people, will have troubles to understand why certain rules were not executed while others did. For real-world business models even the best explanation reports and execution traces could be difficult to follow. When complex logical errors occur, decision model authors discover that their business rules and decision management environment is only as good as the rule debugging tools it offers!

What business users expect from Rule Debugger?

To deal with complex logical errors, software developers usually rely on very powerful Code Debuggers. However, business users don’t have (and don’t need) access to executable code. What they need is a powerful while easy-to-use Rule Debugger to debug their business logic in business terms without becoming de-facto programmers.

A Rule Debugger is a tool oriented to non-technical users, subject matter experts, that helps them to figure out what is wrong with their business logic as fast as possible. A good Rule Debugger should allows them to step through the execution of their business decision models, pause them at any rule or ruleset, and inspect the state of the decision model. The primary features include:

• Select and execute different test cases
• Visualize, trace, and control the execution flow
• Step through the execution and pause at any rule or ruleset
• Enable/disable breakpoints
• Inspect the state of all or selected decision variables
• Ease of use.

OpenRules Graphical Debugger

I believe that with OpenRules Decision Manager 8.3.1 we have delivered something very close to the ultimate Rule Debugger for Business Users. While it provides all listed above capabilities, our main focus was on ease-of-use!  Here is a Rule Debugger’s screenshot:

You can watch this video to see OpenRules Debugger in action. You also can find a detailed description of the new debugger with various screenshots here.

Our Rule Debugger is a component of OpenRules Explorer, an integrated graphical decision management environment. Install it and debug the standard or your own decision models to judge yourself about its power and how easy to use it.

Conclusion

OpenRules Debugger satisfies all requirements for the modern state-of-art easy-to-use debugging tool oriented to business users. It provides practical help to creators of business decision models when they need to understand the behavior of their models and to find bugs in the most complex logical situations.