Implementation

Having analyzed your business requirements, you are now in a position to start the implementation of your key decision factors for your product.

You are likely to re-use calculation results already implemented for your eligibility/entitlement calculations, as typically the factors that identify as "key" are those already part of your eligibility and entitlement logic. As such, the effort required to implement key decision factors is typically far smaller than that required for eligibility/entitlement logic calculations.

It is recommended that you implement your key decision factors rule classes in a rule set separate from your eligibility/entitlement rule set(s), but allow your key decision factor rule classes to depend on your eligibility/entitlement rule classes (but not the other way around).

This approach means that you can evolve your key decision factor implementation in the future without having to retest your eligibility/entitlement implementation; this can be important since key decision factors are merely "view" data to aid the case worker, whereas eligibility/entitlement results may affect more critical business functions such as how much a client is actually paid.

It can be helpful to track the dependencies between your rule sets so that as your product evolves, you have an insight into how changes in one rule set might affect other rule sets that depend on it.

For each product period, you must create a rule class which is responsible for identifying and calculating the key decision factors for the case.

It is possible that your key decision factors are calculated in an identical way across product periods, in which case you may be able to re-use one case rule class for many product periods. Your factoring of common calculated eligibility/entitlement results may affect how you must factor your case rule classes for key decision factors.

You will write the following rule classes:

• one case rule class (per product period) to hold the overall identification and calculation of key decision factors;
• one or more key decision factor rule classes, one for each type key decision factor supported by your product; and
• zero or more key event rule classes, one for each type of named event supported by any of your key decision factors.

The sections below detail a step-by-step path to implement your key decision factors.