Writing Effective Business Rules

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

Designed to meet the needs of business analysts, this book provides an analysis of rule types and a set of syntactic templates from which unambiguous natural language rule statements of each type can be generated. It explains how to develop an appropriate business vocabulary and generate quality rule statements using the appropriate templates.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.