Business rules are the constant driving force within your organization, surviving across multiple implementations, application lifecycles, and platform changes.
What Are Business Rules?
Business rules are the embodiment of your organization’s policies, practices, and operational guidelines, developed and refined over time. These rules ensure your business runs smoothly and consistently.
For many organizations, these rules are deeply embedded within the technical languages used to build their applications. As a result, they are often inaccessible to anyone other than the most skilled technical personnel. These rules are seldom documented outside the applications, making them difficult to understand or alter by non-technical staff.
Structural Business Rules
These define how data is organized within your system, including data sets, their attributes, relationships, and the user interface design. They also detail how the system is structured into individual use cases or activities, as well as the flows between them.
Functional Business Rules
These rules specify how data is processed within the application. A typical functional business rule might be stated as: “If this condition is met, then take these actions.”
CORE’s business rules extraction process delivers outputs in various formats, including:
- UML Artifacts: Activity Diagrams, Class Diagrams, Use Cases
- Office Documents: Visio, Word, and Excel for further elaboration by analysts
- Programmable Formats: DDL, SQL, and XML for integration with your systems
Why Recover Business Rules?
Since business rules define how your organization operates, it’s essential for business users to understand both new and long-standing rules. A lack of understanding can result in poorly designed systems and operational inefficiencies.
When business analysts and programmers work with incomplete or misunderstood business rules, the consequences can be costly and severe. Undocumented rules are often overlooked during implementation, leading to discrepancies, additional testing cycles, and unexpected costs.
Documenting and understanding these rules is the first critical step before any process improvements or system changes can be made. It is nearly impossible to improve your organization without first understanding your existing systems and their effectiveness. CORE’s solution enables you to view applications from a business rule perspective, independent of technical languages and platforms, making it easier to understand and reuse over time.
Immediate Benefits of CORE’s Business Rules Extraction Tools:
- Reduces business rules extraction costs
- Provides a consistent, repeatable process across multiple languages
- Accelerates knowledge mining capabilities for business analysts
How Can Extracted Business Rules Be Used?
Business Analysts
Extracted business rules allow analysts to document existing functionality, specify changes to current applications, outline functionality for new applications, or compare current systems to software packages being considered for purchase.
Programmers
Extracted business rules help programmers locate existing functionality across the system for reuse, cross-referencing, or general research.
Having access to these rules through an interactive tool encourages code reuse, improves application consistency, and allows for direct mapping of business rules to the source code.
Key Uses for Extracted Business Rules:
- Capture frequently changing policies and rules
- Implement changes quickly and efficiently within business applications
- Manage and write rules in a business-friendly language
- Enable business users to update software according to their own schedule
Direct Benefits to the Business and the IT Group
A structured approach to business rules management brings numerous advantages to both business users and IT teams, including:
- Helping business analysts understand and work with the system
- Enhancing communication of system functionality to business users and management
- Assisting new and existing programmers in finding and understanding functionality
- Increasing programmer productivity by enabling code reuse
- Feeding the reengineering and migration process with clear design documentation
- Aiding in the evaluation of packaged software replacements
A solid business rule tool also allows business analysts to add comments to further clarify rules, and to perform cross-referencing and drill-down activities interactively. Additionally, it should enable the translation of extracted functionality into structured English or pseudo-code, and allow it to be exported for further development.
CORE’s solution provides all these features, enabling efficient collaboration between business analysts, programmers, and IT managers.
How Does CORE Extract Business Rules?
Traditionally, business rules have been extracted manually, with analysts working closely with programmers to walk through code and match it to existing documentation. This method is time-consuming, costly, and often prone to inconsistencies and errors.
CORE streamlines this process by using tools specifically designed for extracting and displaying underlying business rules, such as UML and HTML-based tools. These tools allow business rules to be extracted quickly and consistently, with just a few clicks, making the process both repeatable and reliable.
Supported UML Objects
The following chart outlines the types of UML objects that CORE supports during the business rules extraction process. These objects are essential for capturing the structure and flow of the underlying business rules in your system.
| UML Object Type | |
|---|---|
| Activity Diagram | |
| Class Diagram | |
| Collaboration Diagram | |
| Component Diagram | |
| Deployment Diagram | |
| Object Diagram | |
| Sequence Diagram | |
| State Chart Diagram | |
| Use Case Diagram |
Software Languages Supported
At CORE, we provide a consistent and structured approach to migrating legacy platforms, including their associated data structures and databases, to modern computing environments.
Our solutions ensure seamless migration of both applications and data to leading-edge Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, and Eloquence, among others.
Most importantly, we stand by our work. Every project includes:
- A 60-day warranty period for added peace of mind.
- A commitment to fixed-price, fixed-timeline delivery, ensuring no surprises along the way.
CORE Migration is a trusted and proven method for transforming legacy applications into modern solutions. With extensive expertise, precision-engineered software tools, and a dedicated team of professionals, we guarantee accelerated and successful migration of legacy 4GL platforms.
| Language | HTML | UML |
|---|---|---|
| ASP | ||
| BASIC | ||
| C | ||
| C# | ||
| C++ | ||
| CICS | ||
| CL | ||
| COBOL | ||
| Centura Gupta | ||
| Cognos Axiant | ||
| Cognos Powerhouse | ||
| Cognos Powerhouse Web | ||
| Cold Fusion | ||
| Common Lisp | ||
| DCL | ||
| Delphi | ||
| Fortran | ||
| HP Transact | ||
| Informix 4GL | ||
| JCL | ||
| Java | ||
| Lotus | ||
| Microsoft T-SQL | ||
| Natural | ||
| Oracle Forms | ||
| Oracle PL/SQL | ||
| Oracle Reports | ||
| PACBASE | ||
| PL/I | ||
| Pascal | ||
| Perl | ||
| PowerBuilder | ||
| Progress 4GL | ||
| Python | ||
| RPG | ||
| SRSS | ||
| Scala | ||
| Shell | ||
| Speedware | ||
| Unix Shell Scripts | ||
| VB.NET | ||
| VPLUS | ||
| Visual Basic (VB6) | ||
| Visual FoxPro |
Databases Supported
CORE supports a variety of databases to ensure compatibility with your organization’s systems during the migration process. Below is a chart of the databases supported for migration.
| Database | HTML | UML |
|---|---|---|
| C-ISAM | ||
| D-ISAM | ||
| DB2 | ||
| Direct | ||
| HP Allbase | ||
| HP Image | ||
| Informix | ||
| Interbase | ||
| KSAM | ||
| Oracle | ||
| Progress | ||
| Random Access | ||
| Relative | ||
| RMS | ||
| Sequential | ||
| SQL Server | ||
| VMS/RDB |