Facilitating the implementation and evolution of business rules

Many software systems implement, amongst other things, a collection of business rules. However, the process of evolving the business rules associated with a system is both time consuming and error prone. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to facilitating business rule evolution through capturing information to assist with the evolution of rules at the point of implementation. We analyse the process of rule evolution, in order to determine the information that must be captured. Our approach allows programmers to implement rules by embedding them into application programs (giving the required performance and genericity), while still easing the problems of evolution. © 2005 IEEE.