In the ever-evolving and complex world of enterprise software, building scalable, secure, maintainable and efficient applications is a bare necessity. As your business and applications grow, the need to build reusable and maintainable assets and applications becomes increasingly clear.
The Library feature in Pega Infinity™ promotes the reuse of modules across applications and systems within an organization to drive the following results:
- Faster development cycles and time to market.
- Improve consistency across products.
- Reduce development costs.
- Ensure quality and maintainability.
- Increase control and agility.
So, what are reusable modules in Pega Infinity?
Pega Infinity champions enterprise reusability by integrating and promoting reusable Rules, modules, and applications in App Studio development experiences.
Rules
In Pega, Rules are the most basic building blocks of any application that can encapsulate your UI or presentations, workflows that are reusable in multiple applications, business logic, or integrations.
Some examples of these Rules include Case Types, Views or forms, decision tables, and connectors.
Modules
Modules are a collection of Rules that can address specific business, integration, or utility needs of an application. Modules can be marketplace components, Rulesets, or workflows
(for example, the Login component or DocuSign Integration component).
Identifying the right granularity of a module is critical to ensure reusability across your enterprise applications.
Modules can be built in Dev Studio and assembled or reused in App Studio. Some examples of reusable modules include Login, Connect to GenAI, Insights, and Dashboards.
Applications
A Pega application is a collection of Rules and modules that generate a production-ready workflow automation solution. By using the Situation Layer Cake™, you can further enable contextual specialization.
For example, you can use a Know Your Customer (KYC) application as a built-on application to customize KYC flows based on industry or country.
Manage assets through the Library in App Studio
To build, discover, and use reusable assets in Pega Infinity, use to the Library section in App Studio.
The Reuse Library displays Rules (Case Types and business logic Rules) that are marked as relevant records. The system automatically marks all the Rules that you create in App Studio as relevant records. If you create a type of Rule that the Reuse Library supports, the Rule is automatically available in the Reuse Library.
If you create a Rule in Dev Studio, you must mark the Rule as a relevant record for it to be available for reuse in App Studio.
To create business logic rules, you can go to the Business Logic section of the Library and create the following Rules:
- Correspondence
- Data Transform
- Decision table
- Decision tree
- Process
- User Action
- When Rule
All Data objects created in App Studio are by default available for reuse in the Library.
In the Library, you can search for and discover all reusable assets across applications and add them to your current application for immediate use.
Real-world example: Reusability at play in a multinational bank
Consider a multinational bank with millions of customers across its offerings, like retail banking, wealth management, credit, and financing. The bank can use the Pega library of assets to promote consistent, secure, scalable experiences across its enterprise.
Instead of building a separate login experience for each platform, the bank can build a login workflow: a standalone module that includes multifactor authentication, single sign-on, and user provisioning. Every product team simply plugs this into their applications, which saves hundreds of developer hours and supports your organisation’s implementation of security compliance across the board.
Similarly, they can customize retail banking applications for each country that applies the Situation Layer Cake by reusing modules for cards, customers, and applications (for example, Retail Banking or Rewards) as needed.
Best practices to build a library of reusable assets in Pega Infinity
As a best practice, reusable assets for your applications should be interoperable, updatable, configurable, modular, and governed.
Interoperable
Apply the same building blocks across authoring experiences and applications. Build the blocks in Dev Studio and assemble in App Studio.
You can build and publish components to Pega Marketplace and use any of the applications across your organization.
Updatable
Seamlessly update individual building blocks without impacting overall applications.
Ideally, avoid allowing direct customizations and extensions when building modules. These elements make modules difficult to update or unable to be updated at all.
Configurable
Control behavior without refactoring or rewriting business logic. Build components with configuration settings to control the customization, which can support seamless updates by avoiding overrides and conflicting implementations.
Modular
Avoid monolithic layers that are too large to maintain or upgrade. Identifying the right collection of Rules or modules that achieve specific use cases or that are reusable is critical for a successful enterprise reuse strategy.
Consult teams across the organization to identify common modules to build and promote adoption across applications.
Governed
A Pega Center of Excellence (COE) should build, deploy, maintain, and monitor the use of reusable building blocks. COE is a governing body that can make your enterprise reuse strategy successful by promoting the right modules, applications, and development methodologies.
Conclusion
Reusability is not just a technical prowess: it’s a strategic imperative. For enterprises that want to build secure, scalable, cost-effective software ecosystems, the Pega enterprise reuse strategy helps you invest in reusable modules and apps that yield compounded returns in speed, cost, quality, and innovation.
Don’t build more: build smarter with Pega Infinity’s Library, just once.
Recommended resources:
- https://docs.pega.com/bundle/platform/page/platform/app-dev/journey-rl-reusable-assets-reuse-library.html
- https://docs.pega.com/bundle/platform/page/platform/app-dev/journey-rl-ways-including-assets.html
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