Act 2, scene 7: Business rules today

Scene 7: Business rules today

Below the interface are the business rules: how each customer's policies, approvals and workflows apply the product's capabilities. They vary from customer to customer, and mature products let customers adjust many of them through configurable workflows, which vendors say cover most common scenarios. When a customer needs something the workflows cannot express, there is no middle option. Either the configuration exposes a value for it, or it becomes an engineering change to code every tenant runs on. A special case in shared code does the most harm in the business rules, because a change made for one customer can surface as a defect for another.