Writing Effective Business Rules: A Practical Method

A proven practical method for writing unambiguous natural language business rule statements

Writing Effective Business Rules

A Practical Method

Graham Witt

The book takes the study of business rules from theory into practice. This is important as it enables professionals to readily use business rules techniques in the workplace.

— Glen Bell, Enterprise Architect and former Senior Manager, Strategy & Architecture, Australian Securities & Investment Commission

A valuable resource to the individual (and team) wanting to have an in-depth treatment on the how to’s of business rules.

— Keri Anderson Healy, Editor, BRCommunity.com

Writing Effective Business Rules moves beyond the fundamental dilemma of system design: defining business rules either in natural language, intelligible but often ambiguous, or program code (or rule engine instructions), unambiguous but unintelligible to stakeholders. Designed to meet the needs of business analysts, this book provides an exhaustive analysis of rule types and a set of syntactic templates from which unambiguous natural language rule statements of each type can be generated. A user guide to the SBVR specification, it explains how to develop an appropriate business vocabulary and generate quality rule statements using the appropriate templates and terms from the vocabulary. The resulting rule statements can be reviewed by business stakeholders for relevance and correctness, providing for a high level of confidence in their successful implementation.

Features

• a complete set of standard templates for rule statements and their component syntactic elements

• a rigorous approach to rule statement construction to avoid ambiguity and ensure consistency

• a clear explanation of the way in which a fact model provides and constrains the rule statement vocabulary

• a practical reader-friendly user guide to the those parts of the SBVR specification that are relevant to rule authoring

About the Author

Graham Witt, Associate Director, Ajilon

In Graham’s 30+ years of industry experience, he has developed specialist expertise in information management, requirements specification, user interface design, data/object modelling, relational database design, data quality, business rules, ontologies, metadata and CASE.

Graham has completed successful projects for clients in education, health, telecommunications, finance, transport and utilities. To ensure solutions meet business needs, Graham has developed innovative methods, including assertion models, object class hierarchies and natural language business rule templates.

He co-authored “Data Modeling Essentials” with Graeme Simsion, has presented at conferences in Australia, the US, the UK and France, and has published in the information management press, most recently in articles for the Business Rules Community website. He is an effective IT educator, having developed and presented Data Modeling and Database Design training courses for various clients in Australia, Canada and the US.

Graham C. Witt is an independent consultant with over 30 years of experience in assisting enterprises to acquire relevant and effective IT solutions. His clients include major banks and other financial institutions; businesses in the insurance, utilities, transport and telecommunications sectors; and a wide variety of government agencies. A former guest lecturer on Database Systems at University of Melbourne, he is a frequent presenter at international data management conferences.