Start with Knockout Rules
A decision flow (or decision flowchart) is a visual representation of the steps involved in making a decision. While there are many ways to organize and diagram your decision steps, refer to your business requirements for the best approach. In general, we recommend focusing on your knockout rules first. Defining your high-level decision flow should be your next step to transforming requirements into business rules after you have created your form structure. This is a continuation of our Authoring Business Rules 101 series covering key takeaways from our presentation at BBC 2024. You can view the full “Authoring Business Rules 101” recording here.
Car Insurance Example
Continuing with our car insurance example, your knockout rules determine whether or not an applicant is eligible. Based on your business requirements, you have 3 outcomes: approve, decline, refer:
- Approve: Applicant passes knockout rules and proceeds to the next step to determine pricing, terms, etc.
- Decline: Applicant fails knockout rules and is automatically declined.
- Refer: Applicant needs additional review by an insurance underwriter to determine eligibility.
Diagram the Decision Flow
Based on the above, your flowchart would start with Knockout Rules and then branch into either Approve, Decline, or Refer. We recommend organizing your decision flow this way because this will help you with regression testing and QA. For example, you have a data sample of 100 records, where you approved 60, declined 15, and referred 25. When you “run” the rules on those records, you should expect to see those same numbers in the respective paths. Below is what your decision flow would look like:
Decision Flow in Context
Wait a minute, you may be wondering. You expect to see only 60 applicants approved, but the screenshot shows 100. That’s because we haven’t actually authored the business rules yet! But, as you can see, SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager allows you to author decision flows and business rules in context of your data. With SMARTS™, you can test your rules on multiple records and then drill down into individual records. For example, let’s say you run your rules on 100 records but you only approve 59 (instead of 60). You can find the incorrect record to see where in the decision flow or rules the record went on the “wrong” path. This will help you easily identify any errors in development. By designing your high-level decision flow and leveraging a decision management platform like SMARTS™, you will improve the overall quality of your business rules.
Continue to our next post, Write Business Rules – Author, Test, Repeat.