One of the questions clients often ask me, is how can new developers to Pega learn the product quickly? Or, more appropriately, what skills should they be looking for in the people they’d like to move into their Pega practice?

While it’s technically true that anyone is theoretically capabile of learning the product, there are, however, some skillets which I have seen yield better results on average than newcomers without the same skillets. This is not meant to take away from allowing business users to use the system and manage rules –  this is geared more towards the technical folks who will be doing the design/development of the application.

The skill I would consider most beneficial when moving into being a Pega System Architect would be:

A strong understanding of Object Oriented Design & Principles (background developing in an OO language helps)

Pega’s product is built on JAVA, and produces JAVA code behind the scenes that is executed at runtime, but this recommendation has less to do with that aspect, and more to do with the overall design of both the OOB rules & class structure, and the designs of applications built within Pega. The idea of objects & their relationships is highly evident within Pega applications. Class Structures, and reusability of objects, attributes (properties), and other rules is carried out via inheritance paths. A good understanding of what an object is, how it relates to other objects, how it inherits properties & actions from its parents is a HUGE help in learning the product, and learning how to design well within it.

Additional skillets that I’ve seen be beneficial are:

  • Understanding of Integration types – Web Services, Queuing Mechanisms, File, HTTP, SQL, etc….
  • Understanding of HTML & XML, and to a lesser extent Javascript & AJAX
  • Understanding of logic. If then else & boolean expressions
  • Understanding of Relational Databases & their components
  • Understanding of Enterprise Architecture, WebApp Deployments/Architecture
  • Understanding of the concept of “work” and business process flows (workflow)
  • Business & Domain knowledge help as well, as it may be turned into data objects and rules within PRPC

As well as general software development basics such as:

  • Understanding of SDLC and various methodologies – especially agile/iterative ones
  • Understanding good design approaches and conventions
  • Understanding troubleshooting & testing techniques

One exercise I’ve found beneficial when training developers new to Pega/PRPC is to design out an application in their native OO language using such things as UML, Entity-Relationship Diagrams, Use Cases and Process flows and then design out the same application in Pega. While the syntax and the “rules” we use within Pega are a bit different, the general design concepts translate over pretty well. For example, within JAVA we have classes with attributes, methods, and constructors – and those classes can extend (or be extended by) other classes. In Pega, we also have a class structure and within each class we have properties, activities, and models. In addition, such things as decision logic (and virtually all structured functionalities) are abstracted out into their own rules within Pega for easy reusability by inherited classes & other rules.

While certainly much more goes into learning Pegasystems BPMS solution, I hope this is a good overview of some beneficial skills  that may help newcomers when first attempting to figure this stuff out!