HACKER Q&A
📣 mh44

How do I spend less time updating “business logic”?


I work with operations teams that need to frequently update very simple business logic (think SQL). Other engineers who work with operations teams (customer success, fraud/risk, content moderation), do you use internal tools to make you productive? Or enable ops to self-serve via low-code?

Looking to spend less time updating logic and more time building systems.

  👤 Jugurtha Accepted Answer ✓
Have you explored business rules engines[0] and business rule management systems[1] such as Drools[2][3]?

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_rules_engine

- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_rule_management_syste...

- [2]: https://www.drools.org/

- [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drools

👤 giantg2
We've done some things like that. The best thing I've seen for trivial business changes is to train two business people how to update the fields they need to. It works best with a simple UI in front of it.

As an example, maybe they want to change a cutoff from $100 to $50. You can provide them a standard query for modifying this field. Then they can change the cutoff value as needed. You could keep the SQL to yourself and just plug the number in that they gave you and run it yourself. Of course if you code it as an SP then it's fairly trivial to stand up a basic service and UI in front of it for them too.

👤 taxcoder
Would MS Access be an option? I know Access has a bad reputation, but it is very good at giving non-developers a tool to write queries. There are likely other low code tools that would work, as you mentioned.

At a prior job I managed an Access application. Several accountants wanted to query some of the data but were not willing to work in Access. I used Excel to query the data they wanted. Then they could sort and filter to their hearts content.

👤 oliverx0
Founder of Seliom here. We provide a low-code business workflow automation platform, in which non-technical folks can update business logic quite easily. Happy to give you a demo.

Check out our solution at https://www.seliom.com