A Cutting-Edge Unified and Stable Rule Design Pattern

Abstract

Often, changing market dynamics require business applications to quickly and efficiently adapt to the needs of the ensuing business environment. Business Rules excel in delivering software solutions that are implicitly adaptable to changing business requirements; thus they can prove to be an effective tool to provide necessary flexibility and control for rapidly deploying changes across a wide array of business operations. When a proper design is employed, business rules provide a robust and capable way of enabling enterprise software that adapts to changing business needs. In other words, business rules find varied applications and ways of use, for example, managing a pending problem, using it as production rules and for facilitating collaboration between various systems, etc. However, despite a plethora of tools and technologies available, most organizations still find it difficult to define or model workable business rules explicitly. Furthermore, from a macroscopic point of view, rules are important and inseparable artifacts in governing a software application to make it comply with the system goals. In this paper, the current ways to manage business rules along with their pitfalls are discussed, and therefore, a new approach for developing rule-based business architectures is proposed. The proposed approach allows for both managing and reusing business rules.