Business rules offer a powerful tool for requirements professionals, business analysts, and IT professionals to simplify processes, to come to grips with real-life complexity, and to improve communication with business leads (and IT). As this article explains, the basic principles and techniques of business rules are relatively straightforward. From there, it’s all a matter of just getting started, staying focused, and using the right techniques.

In this week's article Ronald G. Ross gives his thoughts on expressing and applying business rules. To quote Ron: "Every requirements professional should understand the proven techniques developed over the past decade or more and be able to apply those techniques effectively in their practice. It’s not enough to understand business rules intuitively; you have to define and analyze them structurally. And you need to be able to capture business rules apart from any and all system design artifacts. We think these skills are essential.

by Francois Coetzee

Creating business models that are easy to understand are invaluable tools for understanding the inner workings of the organization, its functions, its role players and the business entities it uses, creates and consumes. It is a critical foundation for the system models that describe the supporting software architecture and allows for easy trace-ability and impact assessments of business to system and system to business. Using the simple approach described in this article will allow the business modeller to rapidly create accurate business models.