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When you incorporate business rules concerning workgroups and users, scheduled jobs, and so forth, the Business Rules Subsystem can become very complex. In fact, the bulk of the time consumed on software development projects is in the elaboration of the logic incorporated in business classes. All nonpolicy subsystems are pretty standard and highly reusable almost immediately upon implementing them. However, business classes are defined from a number of sources, including the memory and experiences of employees. Designing and implementing the Business Rules Subsystem, therefore, requires great patience on the part of the Visual Basic development staff. |
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Guidelines for Identifying Business Rules and Enterprise Objects |
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The identification of business rules starts with use cases and business process models primarily. But in the absence of these artifacts, you can discover business rules by creating use cases, which involves talking to the users. Day 2, Fundamental Object-Oriented Analysis, and Day 10, Refining Use Cases as Application and Subsystem Architecture Blueprints, discuss use cases. You can also simply interview users and search through operations manuals and user manuals for legacy or peer applications. |
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WORKING WITH KEY STAKEHOLDERS |
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| | Trying to document business rules is very difficult. In fact, if you're not careful, you can consume lots of time trying to identify all of them. And even if you are fortunate enough to have identified them all, they may change, as organizations are very dynamic. Thus, you must work with key project stakeholders on a regular basis to ensure that the assumptions you make about business rules are valid. The stakeholders you should work with include the following: | | Project manager, process owner, or similar people | | Users | | Upper executives or the executive sponsor, if appropriate | | Developers already on-board at the organization or who have extensive experience in the problem your application is attempting to solve | | Business analysts, or equivalent, whose job it is to maintain documents and models that reasonably reflect the current state of business rules and process in the organization |
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