Our visual Design Studio makes extensive use of logic decision tables to represent the application design. Decision tables have been an important ingredient of software design for more than 4 decades. Decision tables are very useful because they:

• show complex logic in a simple format
• separate business logic from an application
• express application thinking in a way that business people understand
• allow complete, validated, tested logic to be turned into executable code

A Decision Table is comprised of Rules and Actions. The sample decision table shown below contains Rules shown in blue and Actions shown in orange. For example:

Many business rule systems require the user to write code (e.g., Java or C++) to integrate with some "rules engine" and this is a lot of extra work. The Spotlight Design Studio addresses the following issues typical of a traditional rules system:

• in our environment, no application coding or framework is required
• no code integration with a run-time engine is needed
• no special 'rules' languages is used
• there is no need for Business-to-IT translation because the business user is in control
• no unique skills are required
• in our environment, the Application and its Decisions are the focus (unlike the business rules arena where the Rules are the focus)

Our products help business and IT users develop enterprise decision-automation applications in a timely, productive, and cost-effective manner using simple visual tools. We combined a number of technologies into a powerful, flexible, agile, cost-effective development environment. These include:

• decision tables for logic completeness
• verification, validation, and test methodologies
• automatic generation of optimized, tested applications
• automatic generation of SQL code
• a robust run-time environment to execute the finished application
• an optimized run-time execution environment