BUSINESS RULE EXTRACTION TECHNIQUES FOR COBOL PROGRAMS

Business rules are operational rules, often coded into software, that business organizations follow to perform various activities, such as t ransaction processing, quality control, business planning and database management, Over time, business rules evolve and the software that im plemented them are also changed and maintained. As the encompassing so ftware becomes large and aged, the business rules embedded are difficu lt to extract and understand, evolving with the encompassing software over time. Furthermore, the encompassing software is changed without c hanging the corresponding text documents, and thus, often, the busines s organization trusts the code more than any other documents. This pap er proposes several techniques to extract business rules from legacy c ode. It is possible to use a generic software maintenance tool to extr act business rules; however this can be an expensive exercise. We prop ose a tailored solution approach for the business rule extraction (BRE ) problem, which combines variable classifications, program slicing, h euristics for identifying slicing criteria, multiple representations o f business rules, bottom-up data flow analysis and hierarchical abstra ction, among other maintenance techniques. The proposed solution appro ach has been implemented as a system and successfully tried with a num ber of industrial programs. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.