Tools and methodologies for designing ECA applications have been
requested since the early 1990s. With the recent big interest in Event
Processing, similar requests for tools and methodologies have resurfaced. 

The talk presents various approaches to providing software engineering
guidelines. The presented approaches have appeared within the active
database community. Thus, they cannot directly be carried across to the
event processing community. Instead they need to be adapted and
complemented with approaches from other (sub)areas that are part of 
the Event Processing community. 

A first step, is to collect guidelines for when to use events/rules and when
not to use events/rules. Today, these guidelines are scattered in research
articles and in teaching material.