Use the strengths of declarative models to unleash the expertise of both your software developers and your business analysts. Since declarative models clearly separates the business content specifications from the technical detailes of the developed software, both sides can work independently of each other and in parallel.

Let your software experts shine

How come it takes so long for a newly employed software developer to be effective? It’s often the time it takes to learn your application’s business content and domain specifics. But when you hire someone, your job advertisement was probably focused on technical things such as knowledge about programming languages and particular frameworks. You were simply looking for an expert in some specific field to fill the gap where you were lacking resources.

Declarative models lets you take full advantage of that person’s skills from day one. He or she ”only” needs to learn that most of the business content is generated code and that focus is on the implementation framework.

Let your business analysts shine

When a business analyst has an idea for some new functionality to be incorporated into your software, it needs to be specified in some way and given away to a software developer to implement. There are two problems with this approach,

1. The specification must be precise enough for a developer to understand.
2. The new functionality cannot be tested until it’s been passed along the development process and eventually built into an executable program.

The first problem is consuming unnecessary resources, since the business analyst does not know which developer that will get the programming task. This means that the specification will be either too detailed or too sketchy. Either way it’s a waste of business analyst resources.

The second problem is that of calendar time. If you run an agile process then the actual development work will probably not be made until next sprint. This means that the business analyst cannot test the new functionality until long after it was conceived. Not a particularly quick feedback loop.

With declarative models and an automated build process, the business analyst could simply change the specification and directly see the result. How soon, depends on the capacity of your build process.

Go unleash your expertise