[Colloq] Faculty candidate talk - Thurs Jan 24

[Carole Hafner]

         Business Rules:  A Microcosm of Requirements Engineering
                              Sol J. Greenspan

                          Thursday, January 24, 2002
                     11:00 a.m.  Room 149 Cullinane Hall

                                 ABSTRACT
 
 Business rules represent policies, procedures and practices of an 
 enterprise (such as a commercial business, government agency, or 
 educational institution) that guide and constrain the enterprise's 
 way of doing business.  To get the full benefits of business rules, 
 one needs an approach to representing and managing the business rules 
 through their full lifecycle, from acquisition through deployment and 
 evolution.  This talk describes a framework and methodology for 
 modeling an enterprise, its business rules, and the decision 
 structures involved in business rules analysis and generation.  This 
 work demonstrates the possibility of automated support of the 
 business rules lifecycle by automatically generating business rules 
 from the modeled information along with data representing domain 
 experience. A business rules development tool was implemented to 
 illustrate and demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
 
 Business rules can be viewed as special kinds of enterprise 
 requirements that are characterized by their business orientation and 
 their propensity for change.  The business rules lifecycle thus 
 serves as a useful microcosm, or test bed, for studying some very 
 challenging issues in Requirements Engineering: 1) bridging the 
 traditional gap between business needs and system requirements, and 
 2) enabling rapid system modification in response to changing 
 requirements.
 
 The talk reviews some principles of requirements modeling that carry 
 over as well to the business rules context, describes the research 
 trajectory that has led to the work on business rules,  presents the 
 business rules approach along with examples from industrial 
 experience, and poses challenges for future research directions.

 Host: Carole Hafner