Application development today has become much easier than a few decades back. You don’t need a working prototype or even a pre-existing database to design the workflow and behavior of your application. All you need is an entity-based approach.

An entity is a representation of the relationship between different kinds of data your application has.

Let’s take an example. Maybe your application needs to accomplish the following:

• Store each individual person your organization interacts with.
• For each individual person, store attached contact information so your organization can communicate with them.
• For some individual persons, store attached accounts so your organization can record financial transactions with them.
• Require persons to have contact information to have accounts.
• Calculate account rates based on account properties: longevity, account type, etc.

You can design all aspects of application behavior described above without an application or any existing data, all using entities. First, you’ll need three entities to govern the behavior of all three kinds of data. Call them Person, Contact, and Account. From there, it’s easy to configure all three entities to behave towards each other as your organization requires:

• Make Person the parent of Contact; Person contains This attaches all Contacts to their applicable Person.
• Make Person the parent of Account.
• Create a validation on Account that if Person does not have an attached Contact, Person cannot have attached Accounts.
• Create a rule on Account to calculate account rates based on your organization’s rate factors.

Before a single line of code exists, you can map out your entire application.

Entities support the following design and development activities:

• Configure relationships between data.
• Store specific categories of data.
• Design application screens.
• Attach correspondence and reports to specific screens.
• Validate data.
• Calculate properties based on multiple factors.
• Permit or prevent action on data based on validations or logic.
• Test validations and logic.
• Design workflow.

The entity-based approach is great for productive and efficient design meetings, increased participation from business teams, faster development, and pre-development testing and troubleshooting.

You can perform all the tasks above easily with Sagitec’s Software Studio (S3). S3 is a web-based XML generator that serves as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for binding your benefit administration solution with Business Entities (including data) during design time. S3 lets you take advantage of one integrated system rather than switching between multiple tools for system design. The IDE provides comprehensive facilities for modeling business entities and defining business rules (e.g. logical rules, decision tables, excel rules) associated with these entities, and scenarios for verifying the accuracy of the rules.

With S3, your business teams can hand over the entity structure to the development teams, like an outlined picture ready to color in with the details. Want to find out more about S3? Click the button below.