ارتباط قوانین کسب و کار در حال تحول به طراحی نرم افزار

In order to remain useful, it is important for software to evolve according to the changes in its business environment. Business rules, which can be used to represent both user requirements and conditions to which the system should conform, are considered as the most volatile part in today's software applications. Their changes bring high impact on both the business processes and the software itself. In this paper, we present an approach that considers business rules as an integral part of a software system and its evolution. The approach transcends the areas of requirements specification and software design. We develop the Business Rule Model to capture and specify business rules, and the Link Model to relate business rules to the metamodel level of software design elements. The aim is to improve requirements traceability in software design, as well as minimizing the efforts of software changes due to the changes of business rules. The approach is demonstrated using examples from an industrial application.

In today's business environment of relentless change, software evolution is inevitable since changes generated by business policies and operations need to be propagated onto the support software system. A software system is directly related to the business system within which it operates and is thus a manifestation of some business requirements for operational control and support of decision making. A large portion of total software lifecycle cost is devoted to introducing new requirements and removing or changing existing requirements. It is therefore important to consider development paradigms that attempt to improve effectiveness and efficiency of software in situations that legacy systems need to evolve. The need for dealing with software evolution has led researchers and practitioners to develop techniques that strive to build software systems that can be adaptive to changes [9]. Such techniques propose a software model, or architecture, that has the ability to minimize the effect of changes as well as providing requirements traceability in their model. A number of different technologies are utilized such as object-oriented, distributed system, software architecture and component-based technologies. In this paper we explore a complimentary technique that focuses on enterprise knowledge and its relationship to a software system [22], [25], [32] and [43]. To address the problem of software evolution successfully, we propose that developers must be provided with a process which identifies areas of potential change and offers explicit representation of these volatile concepts. Such a paradigm would provide the means of maintaining specifications at a high level, minimizing the effect of changes on software maintenance. We define these volatile concepts as those aspects of the business environment which explicitly refer to policy statements about the operations of the business namely the business rules. Our research attempts to address software evolution by considering business rules as a volatile part of a software system. Our work focuses on a user-driven software evolution paradigm and in particular on the way that changes in business rules affect changes to software systems. The approach known as MBRM (Manchester Business Rules Management) comprises of a number of activities, techniques and support systems. This paper focuses on one aspect namely that of linking conceptual specifications of business rules to software designs. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the problem of software evolution and its relationship to business change. It briefly overviews key developments in Software Engineering in relation to software evolvability and develops the main arguments for the business rules paradigm. Section 3 is concerned with research initiatives in business rules modelling and evolvable software architecture. Section 4 introduces the MBRM approach in terms of its main processes and the underlying metamodels. These metamodels constitute the `theory' on which the linking between business rules and software designs in the MBRM approach is based and details on these are given in Section 5. Section 6 demonstrates the principles using a case study. Section 7 concludes the paper with a summary of the work to date and a discussion on future directions.

In developing an architecture for evolvable software systems, MBRM moves one step further by considering the most important sources of requirement changes i.e. business rules. A comprehensive business rule typology was defined in the MBRM metamodel. It also includes a set of structured templates for the specification and management of business rules, as well as linking elements for linking frequently changing business rules to the elements at the metamodel level of software design. We improve the requirements traceability using the linking elements and provide adequate formalization for business rule capture and automated implementation. Using the case study, we compared the MBRM approach to the traditional approach that has been used previously for the development of the Penawar system. We briefly observe that requirements were systematically identified and linked to software design elements. It was therefore much easier to locate and implement the software design changes in accordance with the associated business rule changes when compared to the traditional approach. We are currently engaged in further refinements to the work presented in this paper. Firstly, a number of case studies are currently being used to achieve a complete business rule typology across multiple domains. The study of the effect of design changes to business rules will also play a significant contribution to metamodel refinement. Secondly, change impact evaluation is developed to evaluate the quality of business rules and software design in achieving evolvable software system. Additional components that contribute to this purpose must be added to the MBRM mapping metamodel. Finally, the software tools that support the mapping component of MBRM approach is currently under development.