Business Rules

What are Business Rules?

Business Rules provide a more concrete set of parameters for an operation or business process. They are applied to computing systems and designed to make preordained actions in software. Business rules enable gains in productivity, agility, and efficiency.

In other words, having business rules set means having no need to go one-by-one through each process and change each implementation of the rule manually. Set up conditions and when they’re met, an action is made.

Business Rules Categories:

According to the white paper by the Business Rules Group, there are four categories:

Definitions of business terms

The primary element of a business rule is the language used to express it. The very definition of a word is itself a business rule that explains how people think and talks about things.

Facts relating terms to each other

The nature or operating structure of an organization or business can be described in terms of the points that relate words to each other. To say that a customer can place an order is NOT a business rule; it is a fact. Aspects can be stored as natural language sentences or as relationships, attributes, and generalization structures in a graphical model.

Constraints or “action assertions.”

Every enterprise or organization constrains behavior in some way, and this is closely related to restrictions on what data may or may not be updated. To prevent a record from being made is, in many cases, to prevent an action from taking place.