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Building blocks of Case Life Cycle and Naming Convention

 We discussed about case life cycle (CLC), case type and cases in our previous article about pega express methodology. If you haven't read it , please refer the link : Pega Express Methodology In this article we can discuss about the building blocks of a case life cycle, Stages, Processes and steps.

Stages

We identify Stages in a CLC in the following scenario:

  1. When Case transfer from one worker to another 
  2. When there is a significant change in the case status.
E.g. In case of online ordering , Customer place the request and Company process it , so there is a change of ownership in the case life cycle. So both Submit Order and Processing should be two different stages.

Process 

  • Series of tasks or steps that user complete as they work on a case.
  • A stage can have multiple processes

Steps 

  • Either a User action (An action performed by a user, user is presented with a form to perform the action) or an automated action (Action performed by the system without user involvement) within a process.

Naming Convention


When naming rules in pega also, make sure it is business friendly.

When naming Stage ask yourself the following questions. The Stage name should fit into these questions except for stages that resolve the case.
  • When does this case move to ----------------------------?
  • How many cases are in --------------------------------------?
  • This case is in ------------------------------------------?

Create Stage 

  • Introduced from 8.5 onwards
  • First stage in the case life cycle
  • Indicated by a Green bar
  • Used to set the initial values upon case creation
  • Cannot be deleted or repositioned
  • Cases that include the create stage are persisted be default and are assigned a case ID upon case creation

Resolution Stage 

  • Indicates the case behavior at the end of a case life cycle.
  • Indicated by a Red bar
  • A case should have at least one resolution stage and can have more than one also based on the path the case follows (alternate path).
  • E.g. Verification stage and Approval rejection stage, in both scenario the case is resolved.
Primary Stage : Stages that lead to an expected Outcome.
Primary Path : The path that a case takes through the CLC without deviating from the primary stage is called the primary path.
Alternate Stage : Stages that handle deviation from the primary path .It represents a negative resolution stage or used for exception handling to allow the case to reenter the primary path when the exception is handled .It is optional (it is not necessary that a case should have alternate stage).


  

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Pega Express Methodology

Pega Express

  • It is an Agile delivery approach that uses design thinking to capture the customer journey and quickly deliver an MLP release.
  • In this methodology, you break the overall customer journey into smaller pieces called microjourney which drive the organization to achieve a specific goal.
  • It Focus on delivering one goal at a time rather than developing the entire customer journey at start.

What is Agile delivery approach : It is an iterative approach to software delivery , where we deliver features incrementally in small iterations called sprints. And at the end of each sprint, we evaluate and take feedback from the business to take appropriate actions in the upcoming sprints.

Application Profile landing page in pega is used to capture and presents User stories, bugs, feedbacks to support agile development best practices. It facilitates collaboration between different team members. E.g. . You can create a feature,  map development tasks to this feature by creating stories and other work items. Features supports traceability from objectives to development tasks to implementation keeping all collaborators informed. For more advanced agile practices ,we can use Pega Agile studio and agile workbench. Pega Also support integration with other agile software like JIRA.

MLP Release : It is a value added solution that address a business need or pain point. It is a quick deliverable that add value to business and a lovable solution that end users are eagerly waiting to adopt.

What is Customer journey in pega : It is the sum total of the experiences that your customers go through while interacting with your enterprise. The customer journey documents the full customer experience.

Core Elements or Pillars of a great application are :

  • Microjourneys 
  • Personas & Channels
  • Data & Interfaces

Microjourney : It is a small part of the overall customer journey that focuses on accomplishing a specific goal.

E.g. Customer wants to change their address is a microjourney where the input is the customer request and output is address getting updated in the System of Record (SOR). 

Personas : The Role of the person who interact with an application. E.g. Pharmacist, Medical Director.

Channels : How a Persona interact with an application. E.g. Web portal, Email, Chatbot, Mobile.

Data : Information that the microjourney interacts with to accomplish a customer goal. E.g. Clinical Data, Patient Information.

Interfaces : Where the Data comes from or where it is persisted. E.g. Pega Database, REST Web Service. 

Microjourney Configuration

Microjourney configuration or case life cycle design is done in App studio using Case designer. Once we identified the microjourney, we prepare a business model of the microjourney also know as case life cycle. The model should be in the same way user think about and describe their work. It is the business view of the work to be accomplished. It is the path a case follows to resolution. 

E.g. Consider an Online order process as a microjourney. The life cycle will be similar to 


What is a Case Type & Case: A case type is an abstract model of a business transaction. In the above scenario,  Online Order.
A Case is a specific transaction instance. In the above scenario, if 2 people are ordering the O-1 , O-2 are two cases. And the modelling of the case is called case life cycle. 

The major building blocks of a case life cycle are : Stages, Processes & Steps.

Pega Application design is Modular in nature. The Application comprises of rules organized into multiple layers for reuse between applications. For Example, A company might have several applications that share a common branding. In Pega, We create the rules for defining the look and feel of your application in Organization or framework layer thereby you can reuse it across every application you build. There are multiple layers for the application we build in pega. We have Pega platform layer at the bottom , on top of that Organization, Division, Unit Layer, then Application layer (Framework and implementation layer of application) etc. Under application layer, there can be multiple layers of applications build one over another. Each layer represents a unique application built on one or more layer. This modular approach reduces the development time, improve application quality and maintenance.

  

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Work Spaces or Studio's in Pega

 Work Spaces/Studio's

    Work space as the name indicate is the portal for the developers to do their work. There are 4 role based authoring workspace or studios in pega .

  • App Studio
  • Dev Studio
  • Admin Studio
  • Prediction studio




App studio

   It is mainly used by citizen developers for low code application development, Design cases, Manage data and Design UI. It is know as Low Code Work Space. Also used by business architect and system architect. App studio supports agile development best practices and real time UI design.

Dev studio

   Low code work space with advanced configuration options. Used by system architect and technical team members. As pega is continuously evolving,  the use of more low code and citizen development is getting stronger and stronger, It is recommended to always use the App studio for application development. The configuration in app studio are easy and future proof. But it is not always possible to achieve all the complex business requirement using app studio alone. In such scenario, System architect can switch to dev studio and configure the changes.

Admin studio

   Software administration work space. Used by IT Staff and system administrator. It is used to view the runtime information, Configuration options, Monitoring & debugging system resources.

Prediction studio

 Analytics Work space. Used by Data Scientists and business decision makers. Also used to build Machine learning (ML) models for adaptive, predictive and text analytics. 

To access prediction studio user requires "pxPredictionStudio" portal to be added in their access group.

  

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XSLT - Transformation in Pega

 How to transform XML into XHTML using XSLT in Pega?

       One of the common requirement in a healthcare application is to convert the clinical documents (which is usually stored in an XML format) into a human readable HTML format. We can use XSLT to transform XML documents into other formats (like transforming XML into HTML). XSLT stands for XSL Transformations.XSL is (eXtensible Stylesheet Language)  a styling language for XML.

    Suppose if we want to transform the following XML :view XML

xml


Step 1: Create an XSL Style sheet with a transformation template or if the .xsl file has been provided by the business you can directly use it . View XSL

Sample XSL File

Step 2: Create a binary file rule (Rule-File-Binary) to store the XSL transformation file with .xsl extension.

Binary File to store XSL


Step 3: We can use OOTB function named performXSLT to convert xml to html. for calling the function create a DT and pass the XML Source and relative path to xsl file as input and in output we get the transformed content.

Function rule to convert XML using XSLT

Data transform to call the function

@performXSLT(Param.SourceData,Param.XSLPath,false)

Run the Data transform rule and trace it to find the transformed html:


Tracer results


Transformed HTML Output

Transformed HTML

Based on the style you specify in the XSL the transformed HTML look and feel will vary.



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Low Code Application Development in Pega

   


 Low Code Application Development is nothing but building applications with little to no coding experience required. Pega provides all the tools and technologies and workspaces to achieve this,  so that Citizen developers can build their apps very quickly and effectively. Pega unite Citizen developers and Professional developers similar to each other. 

    what is Citizen development ? A Citizen developer is simply "an employee who creates application capabilities for consumption by themselves or others, using tools that are sanctioned and supported by IT. It is a way of democratizing the coding . Pega provides the guidance and tools you need to establish a successful citizen development program at your enterprise. Pega makes it easy to set up a governance process and automate oversight to ensure compliance and security requirements are met without increasing IT burden.

When you build an application in Pega , you are building it on top of the pega platform (PegaRules rule engine) , but the data which your application is interacting with may be stored in some other system or data base. Pega's  integration capabilities are so strong that allows even a citizen developer can build these integrations to connect to external systems of data. Using App studio (one of the authoring workspace or portal used by citizen developers for low code application development ) one can graphically map data into your application for a holistic view of your application Data landscape. Using Pega you can easily achieve integrations to a variety of Systems of Record (SOR) like integration to an External Data base or to an external web service using REST or SOAP protocols. 

What if the external application which we want to connect from pega does not support an API . Pega have a solution for this also , using Pega Robotic Process Automation (Pega RPA). Pega RPA connects to multiple legacy applications and automate those tedious, time-consuming manual tasks using a software robot.

    Pega RPA works in two modes:
  • Attended RPA : Automations that works along side a human involved in the process.
  • Unattended RPA : Request is placed in a queue for processing later.
Pega also provided a dedicated portal named Pega Robot Manager which can be used to monitor and schedule RPA robots and provide performance analytics of all Robots.

    We use Integration connectors along with RPA for meeting all the enterprise integration requirements. Another important advantage of pega is using the layered approach. For example, Today we are connecting to an external system of record using RPA bot , what if in the future the external SOR application decided to build a new REST API and our requirement has been changed to connect using this API . The Data Source layer and integration layers are separated from the application layer in pega making it easier to update and with minimal impact to the application when the SOR changes. i.e if we change from RPA to REST API , it will be just changing the SOR in pega , the data structure and application has no impact.

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Introduction To Pega Platform


What is Pega


    Pega Platform is a tool, Basically a software developed in Java to build Enterprise applications. Using Pega Platform we can build an Enterprise application very fast compared to building the application from scratch in Java. Pegasystems was founded by Alan Trefler in 1983. The current version of Pega is Pega 8 also known as Pega Infinity. Pega Allows the software developer and Business analyst do their jobs easy by providing many Out of the Box (OOTB) capabilities which are shipped as part of the Pega Platform.

    For example Airbnb is an application used to book homestays for vacation rentals , Twitter is an application used for microblogging and social networking . similarly, Pega is also an application used to build your own business process application  for your own enterprise. Consider you are running a life insurance company, you want to build an application for your business where user can view various insurance policies and file an application based on their needs. now you have two options, building the application from scratch using traditional programming languages or use a low-code application development platform like Pega.

Pega is a software that writes your software using visual, declarative techniques instead of traditional  programming.

    Pega Facilitates :

  • Effective Collaboration : In traditional way of software development , there is always a gap between business and IT. Business stakeholders do not understand what was built and skilled developers lack the proper understanding of the requirements . Pega bridge this gap between business stakeholders and skilled developers using a common visual language. 
  • Super Agile : Using Pega you can deliver value to customers and business more rapidly and iteratively.
  • More Productivity : By using visual language for development , Pega focus on explaining the business logic rather than the complex underlying code. The code gets autogenerated using the visual configurations set up by the developer.
  • Omnichannel Development : Build the application logic once and deploy to any channels like mobile, web portal, chatbot etc.


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