HONGOS COMO FLOR Y CANTO: LA PALABRA HERMOSA, EL
3.2. Percepto, afecto y canto
We define business rules as statements about the enterprise’s way of doing business (Leite & Leonardi, 1998). Organizations have policies in order to satisfy the business objectives, satisfy customers, make good use of resources, and conform to laws
Title: To pay installment.
Objective: The subscriber has to pay the monthly installment corresponding to his saving plan.
Context: The payment is done in the Bank. Restriction: installment is not due.
Actors: Subscriber, Bank, Administration.
Resources: Payment receipt.
Episodes:
The subscriber gives the Bank employee the payment receipt with the correspondent amount.
The Bank employee returns the stamped payment receipt. The Bank sends the payment voucher to the Administration.
Title: To transfer plan.
Objective: To change the owner of a plan.
Context: The subscriber decides to transfer the saving plan. Restrictions: The
subscriber should have all the installments paid.
Actors: Administration, subscriber, group.
Resources: authentic communication.
Episodes:
The subscriber sends an authentic communication informing the change of the owner of the saving plan.
The Administration registers the modifications caused for new adherent in the
group.
The Administration deletes the subscriber from the group.
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or general business conventions. The business rule model distinguishes between functional rules and non-functional rules as shown in Figure 5.
Each type of rule is described in the following sub-sections. The syntax of the rules follows our approach of using restricted, natural language to express entries in our client- oriented requirements baseline.
Non-functional Rules
Non-functional business can be further classified as general or macrosystem rules and quantity rules. We exemplify each type below:
Macrosystem Rules: This type of rule describes policies that constraints the behavior
or structure of the organization. It has the following pattern:
[Property] + Non-verb Phrase + Relation + [Property] + Non-verb Phrase
where:
•
Property is a phrase denoting a characteristic of a Non-verb Phrase.•
Non-verb Phrase is a phrase, which should be an entry in the LEL.•
Relation is a Verbal Phrase.•
Property and relation may be an entry in the LEL.•
A combination of property and relation with a Non-verb Phrase may be an entry in the LEL.The following are examples of the case study. The bold words are LEL terms.
The grantee may reject the car up to three times.
A subscriber may belong to one or more groups.
Quality Rules: Quality rules are demands of the organization on the characteristics of
its processes or products. They usually reflect general policies related to quality standards or quality expectations of the organization. They have the following pattern:
Figure 5: Business rule taxonomy BUSINESS RULES
FUNCTIONAL BUSINESS
RULES NON-FUNCTIONAL BUSINESS RULES
MACROSYSTEM RULES
QUALITY
is-a is-a 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 is-a
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Non-verb Phrase + [SHOULD | SHOULD NOT | MUST | MUST NOT] + Verbal Phrase + Property + [BECAUSE + Cause]
where:
•
Property is a phrase denoting a quality characteristic.•
Non-verb Phrase is a phrase, which should be an entry in the LEL.•
Property and Verbal Phrase may be an entry in the LEL.•
A combination of a property and relation with a Non-verb Phrase may be an entry in the LEL.•
Cause is a sentence, and as such, may have a combination of a Non-verb Phrase with a Verbal Phrase.Example:
The authentic notice to the winner of the bid or Draw MUST be sent
as soon as possible BECAUSE the subscriber has short term to
accept or not.
Functional Rules:Functional rules are general policies regarding organizational func-
tionality. They follow the following pattern:
Non-verb Phrase + Verbal Phrase + [Non-verb Phrase]
where:
•
Non-verb Phrase is a phrase, which should be an entry in the LEL.•
Verbal Phrase may be an entry in the LEL.•
A combination of a Verbal Phrase with a Non-verb Phrase may be an entry in the LEL.Example:
The Administrator monthly draws and bids two cars
The business rules construction process (Leonardi et al., 1998) begins with the identification of the sources of information. Organization documents, such as ISO- required documents (Schmauch, 1995) and organizational models (Yu, 1995; Fiorini et al., 1997) are generally the best sources. If the company does not have any documentation, other techniques such as observation, interviews, and meetings should be used to acquire the information. We categorize the sentences that appear in the sources by considering their purpose in the organization. We try to distinguish sentences referring to: limits, responsibilities, and rights. To decide if a sentence is a business rule, we analyze if it is determined by a decision of the organization (for internal or external reasons) or if it is an inherent sentence to the functionality of the UofD (in which case it is not considered a rule). Taking the concept of stability we determine the stability of each sentence. We use the degree of stability of a sentence, not only to determine if it
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is a rule as (Diaz et al., 1997), but also to attach that information to the rule to help in the construction of architecture adaptable to the organizational changes. Business rules are classified and documented following the presented syntax patterns, connecting them with the corresponding LEL symbols. After documentation, the model is verified against the set of scenarios and the LEL. For the verification process, we use a set of questions of the type: a) For a given rule, e.g., which is the context of the organization in which this rule is applied? What is the associated behavior? What are the consequences produced by the application of the rule? and b) For a particular scenario, e.g., are there any policies that can modify the behavior of the episodes? Finally, the model is validated with the stakeholders in order to detect elicitation errors or organizational conflicts. It is an informal validation with the help of a syntactic-oriented procedure that identifies subsets of related rules given by the use of LEL symbols.