Validating your business rules
February 17, 2010 by Paul M.. Filed under Business rules, Process.
In the previous post I described the nascent need for business rules and their implementation in new software systems. This is a technology that takes the computerisation of business processes up a level in terms of power and flexibility (and reducing friction in business ecosystems, of course!).
But as this approach makes its way into the mainstream of business infrastructure software, one new challenge that will become increasingly apparent is checking or validation of a collection of business rules. This is about spotting flaws – inconsistencies, loopholes, dead-ends, infinite loops, etc. These are flaws that can’t usually be spotted by looking at the rules one or a few at a time. To be completely confident that you’ve got a consistent rules set, you need a means to analyse the whole lot together.
Fortunately our researchers at NICTA have anticipated this looming challenge and have approaches to deal with the problem using formal logic principles. We are starting to work with some trial partners in industry and this may be the topic of a future post. But we’d certainly like to expand the range of scenarios in which this new technology is trialled.
The vision is quite simple: ‘Push-button’ formal logic analysis of your complete business rules set. Instant results will report that you’ve got a contradiction here and a loophole there, etc., thereby allowing corrections to be made before the processes are exposed to ‘production’ usage. Further, as business policies (and therefore processing rules) change, you’ll want to know immediately whether your new rules will play nice with the existing ones.
If these scenarios resonate with you because you’ve been wondering how to deal with the problem of functioning business rules in your (or your client’s) environment, we invite you to comment here or talk to us.
Tags: analysis, business process, Business rules, NICTA
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