Business rule extraction from legacy code

Abstract

Business rules are operational rules that business organizations follow to peq%rm various activities. Over time, business rules evolve and the software that implemented them are also changed. As the encompassing software becomes large and aged, the business rules embedded are dincult to extract and understud. Furthermore, the encompassing software is changed without changing the corresponding documents, and thus often the business organization trust the code more than any other documents. It is possible to use a generic tool to extract business rules, however this can be un expensive exercise. This paper proposes a tailored solution approach to the business rule extraction problem, which combines variable classifications, program slicing, and hierarchical abstraction among other maintenance techniques. The proposed approach has been implemented as a system and successfully experimented with a number of industrial programs. The prototype has been demonstrated at several industrial software maintenance sites since June 1995.

Extracting Business Rules from Existing Enterprise Software System

“…Another program slicing based approach for business rules extraction from legacy code is proposed by Huang et al [5]. They define a number of heuristic rules for domain variables identification, slicing criteria identification, and slicing algorithm selection.…”

“…An extension to Huang et al [5] solution is proposed by Wang et al [1]. The approach proposed by them consists of five steps as follows.…”

Dependency-Based Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

“…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.…”

“…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.…”

Recovering Workflows from Multi Tiered E-commerce Systems

“…To determine business tasks implemented in source code, Huang et al [3] and Sneed and Erdos [1] define business logic code as functions with conditions, and consider 1) output and variables, 2) data flows and data dependencies, and 3) program stripping to reduce the search scope of their approach. In [4], code restructuring and use case identification were used to recover business tasks from COLBOL programs.…”