Business Processes, Requirements, and Rules
Thursday, April 16th, 2009Thanks again to Sandy Kelmsey’s blog, once again I found my way to a surprisingly relevant article, this one about keeping business rules out of your use cases, by James Taylor. In it, he includes a 65-slide presentation that he and Scott Sehlhorst put together on keeping Business Processes, Requirements, and Rules separated. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Taylor but I’ve known Scott Sehlhorst for well over 10 years. He keeps a pretty frequently updated blog that covers a number of subjects, but with certain subtopics that have a lot of posts (requirements, business process).
Here’s the slideshow:
Slide 14 is what did it for me:
- Business Process: What the business does.
- Requirements: How the system must support What the business does.
- Rules: Control behavior of What the business does.
This is a really concise way of explaining why you want to separate these things, without even going into the details of what goes wrong when you don’t. But, for those who need more proof, there are another 51 slides!