A Model Driven Reverse Engineering Framework for Extracting Business Rules Out of a Java Application

Cosentino, Valerio; Cabot, Jordi; Albert, Patrick; Bauquel, Philippe; Perronnet, Jacques

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-32689-9_3

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…When understanding computational business rules, developers must answer which of the conditional statements correspond to the computational business rules for each output of a feature. Backward program slicing [5] is used to understand business rules [2]- [4], [6], [7]. Cosentino et al [4] proposed an application of program slicing to extract statements corresponding to business rules that compute a particular variable.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 43%

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Dependency-Based Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

Hatano

Ishio

Okada

et al. 2016

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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SUMMARY For the maintenance of a business system, developers must understand the business rules implemented in the system. One type of business rules defines computational business rules; they represent how an output value of a feature is computed from the valid inputs. Unfortunately, understanding business rules is a tedious and error-prone activity. We propose a program-dependence analysis technique tailored to understanding computational business rules. Given a variable representing an output, the proposed technique extracts the conditional statements that may affect the computation of the output. To evaluate the usefulness of the technique, we conducted an experiment with eight developers in one company. The results confirm that the proposed technique enables developers to accurately identify conditional statements corresponding to computational business rules. Furthermore, we compare the number of conditional statements extracted by the proposed technique and program slicing. We conclude that the proposed technique, in general, is more effective than program slicing.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 43%

“…They concluded that techniques for data flow analysis and extracting partial paths are required for understanding business rules. The framework is extended for COBOL [6], C/C++ [2], Java [7], respectively. Furthermore, Cosentino et al [4] extended the framework for COBOL programs based on the principles of Model Driven Engineering.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 42%

Dependency-Based Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

Hatano

Ishio

Okada

et al. 2016

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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“…Besides, we are aware that business rules can be enforced in any layer of a software system (e.g., including front-end validations, database triggers and checks,...) so we envision to complement this framework with additional modules covering other technologies (see our work with Java [12]), maximizing the reuse opportunities and providing auxiliary modules in charge of merging and checking the consistency of the obtained rules.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 46%

“…For instance, [11] and [12] propose BREX frameworks respectively for C/C++ and Java; despite our framework shares the same conceptual steps of those approaches, the corresponding heuristics cannot be reused in our context due to the huge differences between COBOL and those languages.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 43%

Extracting business rules from COBOL: A model-based framework

Cosentino

Cabot

Albert

et al. 2013

2013 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE)

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Abstract-Organizations rely on the logic embedded in their Information Systems for their daily operations. This logic implements the business rules in place in the organization, which must be continuously adapted in response to market changes. Unfortunately, this evolution implies understanding and evolving also the underlying software components enforcing those rules. This is challenging because, first, the code implementing the rules is scattered throughout the whole system and, second, most of the time documentation is poor and out-of-date. This is specially true for older systems that have been maintained and evolved for several years (even decades). In those systems, it is not even clear which business rules are enforced nor whether rules are still consistent with the current organizational policies.In this sense, the goal of this paper is to facilitate the comprehension of legacy systems (in particular COBOL-based ones) by providing a model driven reverse engineering framework able to extract and visualize the business logic embedded in them.

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“…For each output, developers are required to answer a question: which conditional statements are relevant to this output value? The developers must then analyze the implementation of the feature and extract the relevant conditional statements in order to understand the business rules Backward program slicing [3] is used to understand business rules [2], [4], [5], [6], [7]. Cosentino et al [2] propose an application of program slicing to extract statements relevant to business rules that compute a particular variable.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 40%

Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

Hatano

Ishio

Okada

et al. 2014

2014 6th International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering in Practice

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In the maintenance of a business system, developers must understand the computational business rules implemented in the system. Computational business rules de¿ne how an output value of a feature is computed from inputs; the rules are represented by conditional statements in the source code. Unfortunately, understanding business rules is a tedious and error-prone activity. Since a feature computes various outputs, developers must analyze the implementation of the feature and extract the conditional statements relevant to a particular output. In this paper, we propose a program dependence analysis technique tailored for understanding business rules. Given a variable representing an output, our approach extracts conditional statements that may affect the computation of the output. To evaluate the usefulness of the approach, we conducted an experiment with eight developers in a company. The results showed that our approach enables developers to accurately identify conditional statements relevant to business rules.

show abstract

A Model Driven Reverse Engineering Framework for Extracting Business Rules Out of a Java Application

Cited by 21 publications

References 19 publications

Dependency-Based Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

Dependency-Based Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

Extracting business rules from COBOL: A model-based framework

Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

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