It is not a secret that many consultants detest writing documentation, often seen as the least enjoyable activity of their daily job. Completely understandable, as writing top quality documentation is a skill. Not everyone feels confident in writing functional and technical specifications.

For many the perception exists that the time spent on configuring or coding compared to testing and documenting is 1-to-2-to-3. For every hour playing, you need spend 2 hours testing and 3 hours writing.

Business Rule Framework can change this pay-test-write ratio from 1-2-3 to 2-1-1.

That is quite a drastic shift in making your daily job more exciting.

It all starts with the realisation that BRF+ is a tool that converts complex decision making from code into configuration, impacting the daily work for both business analysts and developers significantly.

Business analysist use BRF+ to convert business requirements into a working prototype and challenge the key users to discover the true needs. Building the prototype is often challenging, but that is inspirational and a lot of fun. You have full control in building something from nothing without needing a developer. Also the powerful simulation capabilities within Business Rule Framework allows you to input data in a system that does not contain any data. Just import excel worksheets into BRF+ with your test data and you can check if your prototype offers the results expected. And when the protype is approved by the key user, ensuring all known business cases are tested, then you write the functional specification. This document will only change when the key user supplies new test scenarios.

Developers do not have to worry about coding the complex decision making, as BRF+ generates the code by the press of a button. That might take away the enjoyment of coding complex solutions. On the other hand, you do not have to write technical specifications for them either. Luckily they can shift their focus on building an API between the SAP database and BRF+ functions. This Application Programming Interface to support Business Rule Framework can become quite a challenging task upon itself, triggering the same fun endorphins. Achieving a stable and comprehensive API is very rewarding. Side effect is that a top quality API could be reused at other clients running SAP. Even more interesting is an API that would work on both ECC and S/4 HANA platforms.

Converting complex decision making from code into configuration has benefits regarding testing. You already know that BRF+ functions can be simulated and therefore proven fit for purpose before a single line of code is written by the developer. Business Rule Framework supplies code templates for the developer to call the BRF+ functions in the ABAP code. So inserting BRF+ solutions should be a quick and flawless activity. The attention then goes to the supply of data to the BRF+ function and the correct action based on the returned result. Normally these tasks should not be the most complex parts to test by the developer and business analyst. The only potential hurdle is the data quality in the development system.

Where you save time in documentation and testing, it makes sense to invest time in adding quality data in all test environments with the goal to reduce the time spent on testing in the future.

You can conclude that the introduction of Business Rule Framework can directly influence your desire to wake up, get dressed and get into the office to have fun.