Business Rule Management Framework for N-Tier E-Business Applications

Abstract

Business rules have attained a major role in the development of software systems for businesses. They influence the business behavior based on the decisions enforced upon a wide range of aspects. As the business requirements are subjected to frequent amendments, new business rules have to be evolved to reinstate the previously formed ones. Business analysts count on the assistance from the IS developers for this accomplishment. As business rules are set and owned by the business, provisions must be enforced for business rule management by the business analysts directly. In order to get a clear picture of what the current policies and terms in the business are, business users utilize the document as a valuable tool. Unfortunately, documents are not updated as per the modifications in the source code. Moreover, as the software becomes larger, documents become increasingly large and hence difficult to understand and maintain. Thus they turn out to be a non-useful resource in such conditions. With a motive to resolve the above issues, several tools for extracting the rules from the business program code have been developed. In this paper, a robust architecture for an extraction engine to isolate rules from the base source code has been proposed. This suggested model involves slicing of code segments which results in easy identification of domain variables which in turn would result in extraction of business rules, validating them and exchanging them with the newly formulated business policies. This is a new research dimension which paves waves for efficient and quick business rule management strategy.