Linking and Propagating Business Rule Changes to Is Design

Abstract

Among the main challenges faced by today’s information system (IS) are the frequent changes of its business environment.1 Many approaches in IS development attempt to provide techniques, and tools for producing a more resilient software system. Experience has shown that a practical solution for the above problem is very hard to achieve unless we address the root cause for business change which in turn impacts on the need to change the support IS. One such cause is traced to business rules.2 We subscribe to the view that business rule changes bring the highest impact on both software and business processes compared to other changes such as altering code for elegance or speeding execution.3, 4 This viewpoint raises the need to explicitly consider business rules in software modeling for assisting future evolution.5 To date many business rule approaches have emerged that attempt to address the evolution problem. These approaches can be divided into two broadly defined areas: (a) business rule specification and (b) business rule externalization. The former aims to provide complete guidelines to capture and specify rules, whilst the latter attempts to separate business rules from other parts of software system. Whilst the field is well served in each area the issue of linking business rules specified during an analysis phase to a software architecture defined during a design phase remains open. The aim of our research work is to bridge the gap between the two. It is based on the premise that rapid changes in a business environment need to be rapidly implemented on the support software system. By having a specification of business rules in the first place the process of the evolving these rules during analysis is greatly facilitated. If however, this business rules specification requires a laborious interpretation and analysis of the necessary changes to the software architecture, the advantages are minimized.