Writing Effective Business Rules

Chapter 8

An end-to-end rule management methodology

This chapter describes a complete end-to-end rule writing, documentation, and management methodology, with examples drawn from some typical business scenarios.

Effective establishment and ongoing management of an organization’s rule book involves the following phases:

1. discovery: finding out what rules govern the organization (discussed in Section 8.1);

2. analysis: establishing what each rule actually involves (discussed in Section 8.2);

3. developing the rule statement vocabulary as necessary (discussed in Section 8.3);

4. documentation: recording each rule statement with appropriate metadata (discussed in Section 8.4);

5. quality assurance: establishing that each rule statement is correct ...