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Business Rule: Jump To Navigation Jump To Search

Business rules define or constrain aspects of a business and resolve as true or false. They describe operations, definitions, and constraints that apply to an organization. Business rules can apply to people, processes, corporate behavior, and computing systems. While business rules may be informal or unwritten, documenting them clearly helps organizations achieve goals, reduce mistakes, and increase compliance and customer loyalty. Business rules are categorized as definitions, facts, constraints, or derivations. They are gathered when dictated by law, during business analysis, or as ephemeral aids for engineers.

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66 views3 pages

Business Rule: Jump To Navigation Jump To Search

Business rules define or constrain aspects of a business and resolve as true or false. They describe operations, definitions, and constraints that apply to an organization. Business rules can apply to people, processes, corporate behavior, and computing systems. While business rules may be informal or unwritten, documenting them clearly helps organizations achieve goals, reduce mistakes, and increase compliance and customer loyalty. Business rules are categorized as definitions, facts, constraints, or derivations. They are gathered when dictated by law, during business analysis, or as ephemeral aids for engineers.

Uploaded by

Laeh Saclag
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Business rule

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Jump to navigationJump to search
A business rule defines or constrains some aspect of business and always resolves to
either true or false. Business rules are intended to assert business structure or to control or
influence the behavior of the business.[1] Business rules describe the operations, definitions
and constraints that apply to an organization. Business rules can apply to people, processes,
corporate behavior and computing systems in an organization, and are put in place to help
the organization achieve its goals.[citation needed]
For example, a business rule might state that no credit check is to be performed on return
customers. Other examples of business rules include requiring a rental agent to disallow a
rental tenant if their credit rating is too low, or requiring company agents to use a list of
preferred suppliers and supply schedules.
While a business rule may be informal or even unwritten, documenting the rules clearly and
making sure that they don't conflict is a valuable activity.[citation needed] When carefully managed,
rules can be used to help the organization to better achieve goals, remove obstacles to
market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal
requirements, and increase customer loyalty.[citation needed]

Contents

 1Introduction
 2Categories
 3Real world applications and obstacles
 4Formal specification
 5See also
 6References
 7External links

Introduction[edit]
Business rules tell an organization what it can do in detail, while strategy tells it how to
focus the business at a macro level to optimize results.[citation needed] Put differently, a strategy
provides high-level direction about what an organization should do. Business rules provide
detailed guidance about how a strategy can be translated to action.
Business rules exist for an organization whether or not they are ever written down, talked
about or even part of the organization's consciousness. However it is a fairly common
practice for organizations to gather business rules. This may happen in one of two ways. [citation
needed]

Organizations may choose to proactively describe their business practices, producing a


database of rules. While this activity may be beneficial, it may be expensive and time-
consuming. For example, they might hire a consultant to comb through the organization to
document and consolidate the various standards and methods currently in practice.
Gathering business rules is also called rules harvesting or business rule mining.
The business analyst or consultant can extract the rules from IT documentation (like use
cases, specifications or system code). They may also organize workshops and interviews
with subject matter experts (commonly abbreviated as SMEs). Software technologies
designed to capture business rules through analysis of legacy source code or of actual user
behavior can accelerate the rule gathering processing. [citation needed]
More commonly, business rules are discovered and documented informally during the initial
stages of a project. In this case the collecting of the business rules is incidental. In addition,
business projects, such as the launching of a new product or the re-engineering of a
complex process, might lead to the definition of new business rules. This practice of
incidental, or emergent, business rule gathering is vulnerable to the creation of inconsistent
or even conflicting business rules within different organizational units, or within the same
organizational unit over time. This inconsistency creates problems that can be difficult to find
and fix.
Allowing business rules to be documented during the course of business projects is less
expensive and easier to accomplish than the first approach [citation needed], but if the rules are not
collected in a consistent manner, they are not valuable. In order to teach business people
about the best ways to gather and document business rules, experts in business analysis
have created the Business Rules Methodology. This methodology defines a process of
capturing business rules in natural language, in a verifiable and understandable way. This
process is not difficult to learn, can be performed in real-time, and empowers business
stakeholders to manage their own business rules in a consistent manner.

Categories[edit]
According to the white paper by the Business Rules Group, [1] a statement of a business rule
falls into one of four categories:

 Definitions of business terms

The most basic element of a business rule is the language used to express it. The very
definition of a term is itself a business rule that describes how people think and talk about
things. Thus, defining a term is establishing a category of business rule. Terms have
traditionally been documented in a Glossary or as entities in a conceptual model.

 Facts relating terms to each other

The nature or operating structure of an organization can be described in terms of the facts
that relate terms to each other. To say that a customer can place an order is NOT a business
rule, but a fact. Facts can be documented as natural language sentences or as relationships,
attributes, and generalization structures in a graphical model.

 Constraints (also called "action assertions")

Every enterprise constrains behavior in some way, and this is closely related to constraints
on what data may or may not be updated. To prevent a record from being made is, in many
cases, to prevent an action from taking place.

 Derivations

Business rules (including laws of nature) define how knowledge in one form may be
transformed into other knowledge, possibly in a different form.

Real world applications and obstacles[edit]


Business rules are gathered in these situations:

1. When dictated by law


2. During the business analysis
3. As an ephemeral aid to engineers.

This lack of consistent approach is mostly due to the cost and effort required to maintain the
list of rules.[citation needed]
While newer software tools are able to combine business rule management and execution, it
is important to realize that these two ideas are distinct, and each provides value that is
different from the other. Software packages automate business rules using business logic.
The term business rule is sometimes used interchangeably with business logic; however the
latter connotes an engineering practice and the former an intrinsic business practice [citation needed].
There is value in outlining an organization's business rules regardless of whether this
information is used to automate its operations.
One of the pitfalls in trying to fill the gap between rules management and execution is trying
to give business rules the syntax of logic, and merely describing logical constructs in a
natural language. Translation for engines is easier, but business users will no longer be able
to write down the rules.

Formal specification[edit]
Business rules can be expressed using modeling approaches such as Unified Modeling
Language, Z notation, Business Process Execution Language, Business Process Modeling
Notation, Decision Model and Notation or the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and
Business Rules (SBVR).[citation needed]
Business rules encoded in computer code in an operational program are known as business
logic.
Similar to how Business Risks can be structured as:
If <condition(s)> Then <consequence(s)>
a Business Rule can be structured as:
When <condition(s)> Then <imposition(s)> Otherwise <consequence(s)>

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