This is the third post in the Business Rules & the SDLC Series.

Business Rules development follows an independent parallel process from regular software development. In this post I will try and explain the steps leading towards the development of business rules development

The Business Rule Development Lifecycle

As regards to Business Rules, the below graphic is a partial representation of the Business Rules Life Cycle.It is partial because it illustrates only the Rule Development parts of the Life Cycle and not the Change Management aspects

The Rule Capture Phase is an optional phase, and may be used depending on the situation. For known rules, there might not be a Rule capture Phase at all. Many combinations are possible.

1. Start with Rule Implementation straight
2. Start with Rule Capture, and straight through to implementation
3. Follow the process as specified.

All the process steps will typically be iterative.

The Rule Capture Phase

The following image describes the activities that would be part of a Rule Capture Phase. The objective here is to find out what the rules are through research, interviews etc.

The Rule Verification & Refinement Phase

The objective here would be to the refine the rules ,organize them. In other words, business rule design can be said to happen now.

The Rule Implementation Phase

This is the phase when the captured, modeled business rules are implemented to get them into a production form. What that means is that, the business rules are written on metadata. Now the metadata are mapped to either Java or .NET Classes, or XML Schemas or any other supported metadata.

The Rule Testing Phase

This is the phase when the fully implemented rules are tested. Testing can be both unit testing and application level testing. More on testing in the next post in this series

Notes on Application Integration

As explained in my earlier post on Business Rules & Application Design, and also in Seven Tips to your first Rules Project, integration with a rule engine is a piece of cake with most commercial Business Rules Engines.

The following code below show how it happens in In QuickRules.NET.

Final Words and Summary

1. Business Rules Development follows a parallel process, and not the usual SDLC.
2. The involved actors may be Business Analysts, Knowledge Elicitation experts, knowledgeable IT personnel
3. Integrating the Rule Engine is the simplest thing in the world