Technical Concepts That Every BA Should Know

Description: An effective BA need not be a developer, but they must be technically literate. This webinar will define several key technical concepts, and discuss how to bridge communication barriers as they arise.

Let's keep the conversation going! If you have any additional questions for Tim (@strat1) and Dion (@DionLammers) reply here to let them know.

We hope you understand we couldn't get to every question during our Q&A session, but we'd like to provide answers to as many as we can.

Check them out below:

Can I combine RBAC and ABAC in an application, or do I need to choose which Control type I want to use?

Yes, you can combine RBAC and ABAC. Role Based Access Control is always used and every application has at least one Access Group for your users. If your specific application can benefit from this, you can add Attribute Based Access Control to your authorization model.

How do my users know that ABAC is preventing them from access certain attributes? Will they get an error message?

ABAC policies work in the background, on query level. This means that your user will not necessarily know that certain attributes are hidden from them. If you want to inform your users that they an ABAC policy is preventing them from seeing specific data, you have to configure that separately. For example: instead of showing an empty list for bank details, show a message that says ‘You do not have permission to access this data.'

We faced issues in implementing ABAC especially when we make API calls with these restricted properties. Is there any way to have this implemented only for UI and reporting?

ABAC policies work on classes that extend Work-, Data- and Assign-. So when you use 'Int' classes for the data structure used in your integration, then ABAC is not applicable. But it could affect when you map data from a Work- or Data- class to that Int data structure. If you want the policy to only work for UI and reporting and not for mapping towards integrations, you have to add extra conditions to your policy.

In my role as a business architect, I am mostly gathering requirements and writing User Stories. Should I really be building applications in Pega App Studio?

We believe that being familiar with Pega capabilities will help you in writing better user stories. Also, using Pega App Studio to capture the three pillars (Microjourneys, personas and channels, and data and interfaces) during your DCO sessions will add tremendous benefits during the rest of your project. So, even though you don’t have to configure entire applications to be a business architect, spending some time in the application will help you to be successful.

Does the system architect also need to mark a new rule as relevant when the rule was created in Pega App Studio?

No, all rules created in Pega App Studio are automatically marked as relevant, regardless of who adds the rule.

Is data flow always linked to background processing (queue or job scheduler)? If not, how are they different?

Data flow functionality is meant for manipulating and moving large data sets. Even though this can happen in the background, it is a different approach than the queue processing we discussed in the webinar. If you want to learn more about data flows, check out this Community page: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/decision-management/86/processing-data-data-flows

How can we access these business scenarios and where can we practice? 

The slides that we used during the webinar are shared on this Collaboration Center discussion. If you want to try out some of the technical implementations for yourself, you could consider doing this in one of the Pega Academy course cloud environments, or in another sandbox environment you might have access to. Additionally, for more in-depth information on the specific technical concepts covered in this webinar, check out the following Community pages:

Authorization: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/security/86/authorization

Relevant Records: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/application-development/86/relevant-records-rule-reuse

Background processing: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/system-administration/86/managing-background-processing-resources

How do I choose the correct layer from Pega App studio when users are using branches in an existing application that has framework and implementation layer?

Unlike Pega Dev Studio, which requires a user to know where a change needs to reside, Pega App Studio makes these choices for the user. Branch development preferences allow the author to decide where to place a rule through Pega App Studio. To learn more about this, we recommend reading this excellent recent blog post on the Pega Community Blog: https://community.pega.com/blog/how-branch-development-works-pega-app-studio

When background processing updates a case, will that update be refreshed on the screen, if a user is currently viewing their work queue and the updated columns are visible in that queue?

It depends what is currently being updated in the background processing. It most common that users are not active in a case when background processes are active on a case as this brings challenges with locking and updating. There can be use cases where you might have a list in your case of, for example, documents, and there could be some background processing ongoing on those documents that might update a status. These changes are generally visible with the next UI action. You can however configure that a view or section updates when something changes on the server. So this can be done, but needs some configuration.

Can we have another session in this series around class-object definition in Pega during discovery and SLC creation? Currently it doesn't allow choosing framework layer particularly where development is carried out in a dev application, which is built on top of implementation using a framework model.

We are currently reviewing sessions for 2022 - all 2021 have been planned. However, due to interest we are looking into other options for information sharing on subjects that the community has raised/requested.

How can I explore the varied Pega design patterns?

The Pega Community Wiki (wiki.pega.com/) contains a wide range of design patters for Pega Platform and specific applications. These assets explain how to address common implementation patterns using out-of-the-box capabilities. For an example of a design pattern page that is relevant to the content discussed in this webinar, check out the page on configuring asynchronous processing at: https://wiki.pega.com/index.php/Configuring_Asynchronous_Processing

For case audit trails, what user gets logged for a queue processor in the audit trail?

A queue processor doesn't necessarily takes actions on a case (a work item) but when it does you can add a history item in your audit trail. Though a queue processor generally adds multiple (or many) tasks so be aware that each entry is a line item in the report and adding each processed tasks can make the case history huge.

If you'd like to download the presentation in PDF format and are logged in to your Pega Collaboration Center account, you can access the attachment below.

Thank you again for attending, and we hope to see you at our upcoming events. 

You can find the full schedule on our Pega Community Events page.

File Attachments

Technical Concepts Every BA Should Know.pdf