Business rule mining
Encyclopedia
Business rule mining is the process of extracting essential intellectual business logic in the form of Business Rules
from packaged or Legacy software applications, recasting them in natural or formal language, and storing them in a source rule repository for further analysis or forward engineering. The goal is to capture these legacy business rules in a way that the business can validate, control and change them over time.
, which is defined as a formal way of managing and automating an organization's business rules so that the business behaves and evolves as its leaders intend.
It is also commonly conducted as part of an application modernization
project evolving legacy software applications to service oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, transitioning to packaged software, redeveloping new in-house applications, or to facilitate knowledge retention and communication between business and IT professionals in a maintenance
environment.
A manual approach involves the hand-writing of rules on the basis of subject matter expert interviews and the inspection of source code
, job flows
, data structure
s and observed behavior.
Manually extracting rules is complicated by the difficulty of locating and understanding highly interdependent logic that has been interwoven into millions of lines of software code.
An automated approach utilizes repository-based software to locate logical connections inherent within applications and extract them into a predetermined business rules format.
With automation, an effective approach is to apply semantic structures to existing applications. By overlaying business contexts onto legacy applications, rules miners can focus effort on discovering rules from systems that are valuable to the business. Effort is redirected away from mining commoditized or irrelevant applications.
Further, best practices coupled with various tool-assisted techniques of capturing programs’ semantics speeds the transformation of technical rules to true business rules. Adding business semantics to the analysis process allows users to abstract technical concepts and descriptors that are normal in an application to a business level that is consumable by a rules analyst.
System integrators, software vendors, rules mining practitioners, and in-house development teams have developed technologies, proprietary methodologies and industry-specific templates for application modernization and business rule mining.
Business rule
A Business rule is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the 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. Business rules describe the operations, definitions...
from packaged or Legacy software applications, recasting them in natural or formal language, and storing them in a source rule repository for further analysis or forward engineering. The goal is to capture these legacy business rules in a way that the business can validate, control and change them over time.
Overview
Business rule mining supports a Business rules approachBusiness rules approach
Business rules are abstractions of the policies and practices of a business organization. The Business Rules Approach is a development methodology where rules are in a form that is used by, but does not have to be embedded in, business process management systems.The Business Rules Approach...
, which is defined as a formal way of managing and automating an organization's business rules so that the business behaves and evolves as its leaders intend.
It is also commonly conducted as part of an application modernization
Software modernization
Legacy Modernization, or Software modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to a modern computer programming language, software libraries, protocols, or hardware platform...
project evolving legacy software applications to service oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, transitioning to packaged software, redeveloping new in-house applications, or to facilitate knowledge retention and communication between business and IT professionals in a maintenance
Software maintenance
Software Maintenance in software engineering is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes....
environment.
Alternative Approaches
Alternative approaches to rule mining are manual and automated.A manual approach involves the hand-writing of rules on the basis of subject matter expert interviews and the inspection of source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
, job flows
Batch processing
Batch processing is execution of a series of programs on a computer without manual intervention.Batch jobs are set up so they can be run to completion without manual intervention, so all input data is preselected through scripts or command-line parameters...
, data structure
Data structure
In computer science, a data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently.Different kinds of data structures are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to specific tasks...
s and observed behavior.
Manually extracting rules is complicated by the difficulty of locating and understanding highly interdependent logic that has been interwoven into millions of lines of software code.
An automated approach utilizes repository-based software to locate logical connections inherent within applications and extract them into a predetermined business rules format.
With automation, an effective approach is to apply semantic structures to existing applications. By overlaying business contexts onto legacy applications, rules miners can focus effort on discovering rules from systems that are valuable to the business. Effort is redirected away from mining commoditized or irrelevant applications.
Further, best practices coupled with various tool-assisted techniques of capturing programs’ semantics speeds the transformation of technical rules to true business rules. Adding business semantics to the analysis process allows users to abstract technical concepts and descriptors that are normal in an application to a business level that is consumable by a rules analyst.
System integrators, software vendors, rules mining practitioners, and in-house development teams have developed technologies, proprietary methodologies and industry-specific templates for application modernization and business rule mining.
See also
- Business modelBusiness modelA business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value...
- Business ProcessBusiness processA business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for a particular customer or customers...
- Business rules approachBusiness rules approachBusiness rules are abstractions of the policies and practices of a business organization. The Business Rules Approach is a development methodology where rules are in a form that is used by, but does not have to be embedded in, business process management systems.The Business Rules Approach...
- Expert systemExpert systemIn artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the procedure of a developer as is the case in...
- Service level agreementService Level AgreementA service-level agreement is a part of a service contract where the level of service is formally defined. In practice, the term SLA is sometimes used to refer to the contracted delivery time or performance...
- BRMSBRMSA BRMS or Business Rule Management System is a software system used to define, deploy, execute, monitor and maintain the variety and complexity of decision logic that is used by operational systems within an organization or enterprise...
Further reading
- Barbara Von Halle (2001). Business Rules Applied. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-41293-7
- Janet Wall(2006). Mining Rules from Code: Reasonable or Lunacy?
External links
- Rule Mining best practices wikibook.