Strategies for dealing with complex business logic

Strategies for dealing with complex business logic

Mike Hall | 12/04/2010

Developing websites for companies is hard enough already, but when they involve complex business logic or business rules, it gets so much harder!

In an ideal world, clients would fully understand and be able to easily convey their own existing rules and have a pretty good idea of the rules they’d like to implement online, but this is not always the case.

In some cases the client struggles to explain their own rules and haven’t thought about the new business rules needed for their new websites.

Questions like ‘What happens if there’s no one there to accept a delivery?’ on an ecommerce site. 

From a business perspective, you need to decide on how to handle this. Do you return it to the deliverer, what if it’s delivered straight from the manufacturer, do you then take it to your nearest retail outlet? If it’s taken to your nearest retail outlet, how will you make sure it doesn’t get on-sold to someone else, or get put out on the floor with all the other stock. If you try to redeliver it and no one’s there, how many time do you try, and then what? The question go on and on...

Part of the process of developing an online solution is understanding your client’s business needs and developing a strategy for coping for all of these eventualities (and making sure you think about them all). 

At Wiliam, this is handle through the pre-production team, who analyse your business needs, help you identify your key audiences, analyse their expected needs and then develop a strategy for dealing with them.

tags: Business