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Decision tables are a "precise yet compact" (ref. Wikipedia) way of representing conditional logic, and are well suited to business level rules.
Drools supports managing rules in a Spreadsheet format. Formats supported are Excel, and CSV. Meaning that a variety of spreadsheet programs (such as Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice.org Calc amongst others) can be utalized. It is expected that web based decision table editors will be included in a near future release.
Decision tables are an old concept (in software terms) but have proven useful over the years. Very briefly speaking, in Drools decision tables are a way to generate rules driven from the data entered into a spreadsheet. All the usual features of a spreadsheet for data capture and manipulation can be taken advantage of.
Decision tables my want to be considered as a course of action if rules exist that can be expressed as rule templates + data. In each row of a decision table, data is collected that is combined with the templates to generate a rule.
Many businesses already use spreadsheets for managing data, calculations etc. If you are happy to continue this way, you can also manage your business rules this way. This also assumes you are happy to manage packages of rules in .xls or .csv files. Decision tables are not recommenced for rules that do not follow a set of templates, or where there are a small number of rules (or if there is a dislike towards software like excel or open office). They are ideal in the sense that there can be control over what parameters of rules can be edited, without exposing the rules directly.
Decision tables also provide a degree of insulation from the underlying object model.