When this blogger asks Can complicated Software systems really be documented , I find myself agreeing with him to some extent.

I am completely convinced that good design and some better programmers combined with whatever documentation is available is what you could hope for at best most of the times. Anything more, and things would get very costly

But again, this week I had been helping one of our sales guys in filling out a RFI, and was going over some of the rules that the prospect had provided us.

These were pretty complex business rules and numerous in number. All these rules have to be applied on the business data whenever one of a set of well-defined events is triggered in the system (Remember CEP?).

The big news here was that in the current running version of this system, all the business rules are written as stored procedures. So, I tried to read the stored procs to see if I could figure out what the rules were. After hours of hard work, I could finally make sense out of this, but not without some help from some of the business rules documentation that I had been provided with.

I have seen many customer’s of ours also agreeing with the statement that capturing business policies as executable business rules certainly has helped them see their rules clearly.

I could even redefine Business Rules as self-documenting executable business policy statements that drive business decisions.

Of course, how clear your business rules are certainly depends on how well the rules have been written, and a certain logical and clear rule implementation is expected.