DM Challenge – Pay-as-you-go Pricing demo
Our friend Jacob posted a Decision Management challenge this month. SaaS pricing can prove to be a challenge to calculate when combining volume discount and special incentive. In this challenge, I demonstrate how to take advantage of test cases to safely write these pricing rules. Click here to watch the demo
Key takeaways from this challenge
As I hinted, testing against expected outcome is saving a ton of time during rules writing. While I ran into several typos in my data entry, I felt comfortable that my rules were correct (after correcting the data entry).
Seeing is believing. Being able to see what the rules assign to each tier allows for a quick understanding of what was left to do.
Finally, not seeing calculations in place would have likely taken me a lot more time (and a headache) to complete that challenge. It helps a great deal to rely on intermediate calculations when rules end up somewhat convoluted.
While this is a simple pricing use case, business rules can quickly create a combinatorial explosion of scenarios. Decompose your problem in a few simple steps, check that your progress, until you cover all of your test cases.
1. what tier do you start in
2. move extra units to the next tier
3. apply special incentive if applicable
If you want to try building the demo by yourself, feel free to ask for a free evaluation.