Advantages of externalizing business rules
Business Rule Beans (BRBeans) provide a framework in which business applications
can externalize business rules. You can externalize rules by extending your
application analysis and design processes to identify the points of variability
(or "trigger points") in application behavior. When the application is implemented,
the business logic required at the points of variability is externalized into
a business rule. This allows certain aspects of the behavior to be changed
without actually changing the application code.
Here are some advantages of externalizing business rules:
- Explicit documentation of business practice decisions
- Separating business rule values from the application code makes the code
easier for others to view and understand while isolating information that
relates to business practice decisions.
- Clearer understanding of application behavior
- Externalization makes it possible to inspect the application to see which
business rules are being applied, when they are applied, and under what circumstances.
- Reuse of rules across business processes
- Separating rules from the business logic of the application makes it easy
to reuse a business practice decision in a consistent fashion.
- Increased consistency of business practices
- Because externalized rules promote reuse and facilitate clear understanding
of business practice decisions, they provide a basis for improving business
practice consistency across applications.
- Decreased maintenance and testing costs
- Externalized rules have a clearly defined scope and are not tightly coupled
to the application code. This makes them easy to modify, quick to test, and
decreases costs and improves cycle time.
- Improved manageability of business practice decisions
- Externalization, change history, and inspectability all promote clear
ownership and consequently a better definition of who can change rules and
under what circumstances.
- Increased confidence in predicting the business impact of proposed changes
- Because rules are available for inspection, have well-defined scope, and
are not tightly coupled to application business logic, they make it easy to
understand the likely impact of changes and to predict whether contemplated
modifications or additions will have unwanted ripple effects.
- Ability to identify and correct conflicting business rules in different
parts of the business
- Externalized rules make it easy to check that rules being used in two
different parts of an application or even two different applications dealing
with different parts of the business, are consistent.

Using Business Rule Beans
Searchable topic ID:
rbrb_why
Last updated: Jun 21, 2007 8:07:48 PM CDT
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