Our app is growing rapidly. So, I begun looking into business rules as a way to separate some of our logic from the code (big DAAAH ;). The main goal is to allow our business guys to edit and deploy rules without recompiling anything (another big DAAAH). So far, I could only find references to "decision tables" as a way for business to manage rules. The thing is that I tried to introduce the concept of decision tables to our business and got a very "mixed" response, to say the least :) In short, they don't want to understand them. Question: is there an alternative to decision tables? Something that is easier to understand for sales people?
I think there is only one alternative to decision tables - decision trees. Some guys also call them "flow charts", I think. I know several commercial tools that present UI as trees to let users "build" rules with drag-n-drop. Internally though, they convert those trees into decision tables or similarly structured objects when you save rules as files.