Capturing and sharing domain knowledge with business rules lessons learned from a global software vendor

Abstract

Business rules represent constraints in a domain, which need to be taken into account either during the development or the usage of a system. Motivated by the knowledge reuse potentials when developing systems within the same domain, we studied business rules in a large software company. We interviewed 11 experienced practitioners on how they understand, capture, and use business rules. We also studied the role of business rules in requirements engineering in the host organization. We found that practitioners have a very broad perception for this term, ranging from flows of business processes to directives for calling external system interfaces. We identified 27 types of rules, which are typically captured as a free text in requirements documents and other project documentation. Practitioners stated the need to capture this tacit form of domain knowledge and to trace it to other artifacts as it impacts all activities in a software engineering project. We distill our results in 17 findings and discuss the implications for researchers and practitioners.

Workflow Development Effort Estimation as Applied to Web Human Resource Management

“…Business rules are constraints in a domain that need to be taken into description either in the course of the development or usage of a system (Maalej and Ghaisas 2014). Based on a survey carried out by Maalej and Ghaisas (2014) shows that most business rules expert (engineers, software developer) lack enough domain knowledge where the business rules are going to deploying into.…”

“…Based on a survey carried out by Maalej and Ghaisas (2014) shows that most business rules expert (engineers, software developer) lack enough domain knowledge where the business rules are going to deploying into. This made it difficult for expert ''to extract the characteristics of the domain, the restrictions, the constraints, and the exceptions essential in practice'' (Maalej and Ghaisas 2014). Therefore, business rules need to match with domain knowledge and be flexible enough for a nonexpert to reuse.…”