Business Rules vs. Choices Made in Designing Systems … Not the Same Thing!
A colleague and I were recently discussing business rules. In the course of conversation he used this example: A customer may have only one address.
Hold on! That’s not a business rule. Rather, it’s a design decision (probably a poor one) some IT person made in creating a system model. The business wouldn’t (and couldn’t!) make a real-world business rule about customers having only one address. But a design decision might be made to record only one (in a system).
Eventually we agreed the desired business rule probably was: A customer may have only one preferred address.
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This post excerpted from Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules (2011). See: http://www.brsolutions.com/b_building_business_solutions.php
Tags: Business Rules, business rules and requirements, business rules vs requirements, requirements, system design
Ronald G. Ross
Ron Ross, Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rules Solutions, LLC, is internationally acknowledged as the “father of business rules.” Recognizing early on the importance of independently managed business rules for business operations and architecture, he has pioneered innovative techniques and standards since the mid-1980s. He wrote the industry’s first book on business rules in 1994.
Cecilia Pearce
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I see this more and more. One of the reasons, I believe, is because BAs only document business rules during design as they still seem to believe that business rules are about the system and not about the business.