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.

Related tasks
Using Business Rule Beans



Searchable topic ID:   rbrb_why
Last updated: Jun 21, 2007 8:07:48 PM CDT    WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation, Version 5.0.2
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