How do I maintain my configuration data? It is one thing to have them stored somewhere and being able to maintain stuff, if you are a developer or a technical person in general. In which case you will be fine with a plain text editor, sometimes even something like vi (I am an Emacs guy 😉 ). But what if you want business users be able to do this by themselves? In fact, quite often these folks will also tell you that they do not want to be dependent on you for the job.

When trying to identify the requirements for a maintenance tools suitable for business users, I came up with the following points (and in that order of priority):

• Familiarity: People do not want to learn an entirely new tool for just maintaining a few configuration values. So exposing them to the complete functionality of a configuration management system will not work. And even if the latter has something like role-based configuration or user profiles, it will typically just hide those parts, that “normal” users are not supposed to see. But it will still, tacitly, require a lot of understanding about the overall system.
• Safety: In many cases business people will tell you that while they want to do changes by themselves, they still expect you (or the system you develop) to check what they entered. In a number of cases the argument went so far that people, from my perspective, were trying to avoid responsibility for their actions altogether. Whether this was just an attempt to play the blame-game or rather an expression of uncertainty, I cannot say. But for sure you need to add some automated checks.
• Auditing: In many cases you must be able to maintain records of changes for legal reasons (e.g. Sarbanes–Oxley Act). But even if that is not the case, you as the technically responsible person absolutely want to have records, what configuration were in the system when.
• Extensibility: Especially today, when most of us try to work in an agile manner, this should not need mentioning. But unfortunately the reality I mostly witness is quite different. Anyway, what we as developers need to do here, is scrutinize what the business folks have brought up as their requirement. It is not their job to tell us about it, but the other way around.

So what is the solution? I see basically two options here: custom-developed web UI and Excel. The Excel approach may surprise you, but it really has a number of benefits, also from a technical perspective. Remember that it is file-based, so you can simply leverage your normal VCS for auditing. How the business users “upload” the updates, may vary. But you can start with something simple like a shell script/batch file that acts as a VCS wrapper, and many people will already be happy. More sophisticated stuff like a web upload and built-in verification is nicer of course.

A web UI has the benefit that you can provide feedback on rule violation easier, compared to the Excel approach. But what is often overlooked is the requirement for mass-updates. It is a big pain to click through 50 records whereas in Excel that would simply be a copy-paste operation. And the latter is less susceptible to errors, by the way.

Sometimes Business Rules Management System (BRMS) and the web UI they usually come with can be an alternative. But if you are not already using it on the project, the overhead of bringing in an entire additional system, will typically outweigh the benefits. If you still want to explore that route, pay particular attention to how the web UI changes can be synced back into the artifacts in VCS the developers work with.