Decisions

What do you like best?

Decisions makes development very easy and very visual and thus self-documenting. Decisions offers much more functionality than rules - flows, forms, integrations, etc. that make it possible to completely encompass business logic within, and implement complete working "code" modules without code. Decisions also allows for faster deployment of critical fixes. Because Decisions is a visual designer, it's easier to visualize changes, have confidence in them, and unit test individual components. Also, the export/import functionality allows you to quickly promote individual objects, rather doing a complete "build". During our review of rule engine products, Decisions was the most stable and feature-robust rule engine product that we reviewed. Decisions support has been extremely responsive and pleasurable to work with.

What do you dislike?

With Decisions, due to it's graphical nature, you can run the risk of departing from object-oriented code and modular coding principals by creating monolithic and procedural flows. This is not a problem with the product per se; and it is still possible to maintain OO-like architecture in Decisions, but requires some careful planning during design. Also, project with large numbers of objects (we are in the 1000's) tend to cause issues and delays during operational functions, such as repository and import/export when dealing with the project as a whole. (Great strides have been made to improve this functionality since I started working with Decisions in 2015. See note about support in previous answer.)

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Thoroughly evaluate the operational aspects of the product prior under expected load prior to go-live. This will allow you to ensure your configuration is performant at production levels, and allow you to make any performance tuning enhancements prior to go-live. Things such as deployment (whether via repository or export/import), clustering, job configuration, repository, etc.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Decisions was a great solution for our "Insight Engine" product, which processes health and wellness data, and based on rules, launches various processes (e.g. messaging, reports) and creates artifacts (e.g. activities, rewards) within our applications that provide "insight" and recommendations to users to help them manage their health conditions and maintain wellness. Decisions allows us to easily design rules and workflows to support this business-rule centered processing. Decisions also functions as our job scheduler.