The goal of this project is to provide business users in the insurance business a natural and powerful way to specify insurance formula's.

I2S is the market leader in Portugal for insurance software. I2S has executed a large scale modernization project where old-style RPG applications have been transformed to modern style Java applications.

As part of this effort, an editor for insurance formula's was needed. In the old system the insurance experts had to use this notation:

Textual Formula

This is not natuarl toi the insurance mathematicians, and hard to read and understand. To solve this problem we used MPS in the new system, which allows for flexible notations and can support the mathematical notation that the end users were familiar with. The formula above in the new editor looks much more readable:

Formula Editor

Next to editing the formula in a user friendle syntax, we also added the possibility for the user to add tests for the formula directly inside the editor. This makes it easy for the insurance expert to test his formula. Just adding the test cases is quite nice, but it is even better to provide direct feedback to the user by the ability to evaluate the test cases directly inside the editor.

Formula Editor

And last but not least, we provided the user with the option to debug a formula. In this view, the result of evaluating all sub-expressions in the formula is shown directly inside the formula. This allows the user ti=o inspect the results and find out where it went wrong. The green and purple values, are the result of evaluating the sub-expressions in the formula. E.g. you can see that the value of CATV equals 0, as specified in the test case.

Formula Editor

You can find more background and argumentation for the use of business notations in editors in the presentation for the Software Development Automation (SDA) symposium: Domain Specific Languages for Business Users