Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
B
-
USINESS
RULES
HAVE
BECOME
THE
MOST
IMPORTANT
TIER
IN
N
TIER
AND
W
-
EB
BASED
APPLICATIONS
AND
REPRESENT
ONE
OF
THE
STRONGEST
.
ASSETS
Proper identification and encapsulation of
business rules support the open, portable, and interoperable requirements
of an n-tier-based architecture. The technical components of a system can
arguably be commoditized and reused from organization to organization
with relatively minor modifications. However, business rules represent the
thoughts, ideas, and experience of a specific organization. In a rapidly evolv-
ing technical business environment, they offer a consistent competitive
advantage that is not offered by the technology foundation. Business rules
must be managed throughout a project and system lifecycle. They must be
identified, captured, validated, owned, shared, and maintained consistently
across an organization. This section builds a framework for achieving these
objectives. The following chapters are included in this section.
OF
AN
ORGANIZATION
Chapter 8, “Business Rules: Capturing the Most Elusive Information Asset,”
explains the importance of capturing business rules, in a natural language,
early in a project lifecycle. A development lifecycle consisting of 15 steps is
presented and offered as the basis for a business rule methodology. This
spans clarification, identification, management, and promotion of business
rules. This chapter also examines technology that can be used to capture
business rules in a data model format and also to establish a central busi-
ness rule repository.
Chapter 9, “Business Rules: A Case Study,” provides a sample case study
for collecting, analyzing, validating, and distributing business rules. The
business rules are then classified into data modeling constructs consisting
of entities and relationships. This chapter also offers recommendations for
solutions that will support the defined business rules.
Chapter 10, “Modeling Business Rules,” takes a shortcut to a generic
project lifecycle by demonstrating how business rules can be modeled
directly from existing data and object models using extensions. This is
based on a graphical technique that models rules in a declarative form.
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