Business rule verbalization

Abstract

Business rules should first be specified at the conceptual level, using concepts and languages easily understood by the business domain experts who are best qualified to validate the rules. This paper focuses on the verbalization of static business rules (i.e. constraints and derivation rules that apply to individual states of the business), ignoring dynamic rules relating to state transitions and/or workflows. We propose desirable language criteria for rule verbalization, and orthogonal dimensions by which rule verbalizations may be classified, and illustrate these general qualities with a wide variety of business rule examples, using model fragments depicted graphically in Entity-Relationship, Object-Role Modeling and Unified Modeling Language notations.