3 posts tagged with "DMN"

FEEL - the Friendly Enough Expression Language - is what you write inside every DMN decision table cell and, in QuantumBPM, in every BPMN condition and I/O mapping. It is small, but it does not look like the languages most of us came from: equality is =, lists start at 1, function names have spaces in them, and there is no map.

This is the page to keep open while you write it. Every section works on the same sample order, and every section ends with a link that opens it in the FEEL playground with the data already loaded, so you can press Run and change things.

DMN - Decision Model and Notation - is an OMG standard for describing operational business decisions. It gives you a visual, vendor-neutral way to express the rules that take an input context, apply business logic, and return an answer - and crucially, the model is directly executable. The same diagram a domain expert reviews is the artefact a runtime evaluates.

This post is the engineer's-eye view: what DMN is, why teams reach for it instead of if/else in code, and what the moving parts are in a real decision.

BPMN and DMN are two of the most-cited OMG standards in business automation, and they're often confused. The short version: BPMN models processes over time. DMN models decisions at a point in time. They're complementary, not competitors. Most non-trivial systems end up using both.

This post walks through what each standard is, where each one fits, the boundary between them, and a worked example of the two working together.