This week we deal with Business Rules that can constrain software project development to be complaint with domain rules (e.g. corporate policies, government regulations, industry standards, computational algorithms, etc...). We look at the main definitions and a taxonomy that divides rules in facts, constraints, action enablers, inferences and computations. Being able to recognize the difference is important to use the best modeling representation. We see in particular several approaches to model business rules. The more popular is represented by decision tables, but we see also textual process descriptions, state diagrams & state transition matrices and activity diagrams.

Lecture

• Defining & Modeling Business Rules
• The three beasts in Software development: uncertainty, irreversibility, complexity (Note: we covered these slides from lecture2 that were not covered before)