Ron Ross was kind enough to send me a copy of his recently publishd 3rd edition of his book, Business Rule Concepts. Ron has been at the forefront of mainstreaming business rule capture for decades. Personally, I am most fond of his leadership in establishing the Object Management Group’s Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules [...]
Posts under ‘Requirements’
Harvesting business rules from the IRS
Does your business have logic that is more or less complicated than filing your taxes?
Most business logic is at least as complicated. But most business rule metaphors are not up to expressing tax regulations in a simple manner. Nonetheless, the tax regulations are full of great training material for learning how to analyze and capture [...]
Rules are not enough. Knowledge is core to reuse.
James Taylor’s blog today on rules being core to BPM and SOA in which he discussed reuse had a particularly strong impact on me following a trip yesterday. During a meeting with the insurance and retail banking practice leaders at a large consulting firm, we looked for synnergies between applications related to investment and applications [...]
Elicitation and Management of Rules, Requirements and Decisions
A manager of an enterprise architecture group recently asked me how to train business analysts to elicit or harvest rules effectively. We talked for a bit about the similarities in skills between rules and requirements and agreed that analysts will fail to understand rules as they fail to understand requirements.
For example, just substitute rules in [...]
When Rules Meet Requirements
I am working on some tutorial material for business analysts tasked with eliciting and harvesting rules using some commercial business rules management systems (BRMS). The knowledgeable consumers of this material intuitively agree that capturing business rules should be performed by business analysts who also capture requirements. They understand that the clarity of rules is just [...]
Missing Goals and Requirements in Business Rules
Both of the following statements are true, but the first is more informative:
Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) typically produce forward chaining production rules that are interpreted by[1] a business rules engine (BRE) based on the Rete Algorithm.
BRMS typically generate rules that are interpreted by a BRE.
First, dropping the word “production” before “rules” loses information. BRMS [...]