Business rule recovery

Enterprise applications accumulate an enormous amount of business knowledge. It gets built, extended and tuned over decades, usually without the documentation keeping pace.

Eventually the documentation is wrong, the people who wrote the original are retired, and the only accurate statement of how the business actually calculates a premium, prices a product or decides an eligibility is the source code. Re-documenting that by hand is slow, expensive and error-prone. Re-engineering it from an incomplete understanding is worse.

How we approach it

We work from the model rather than by reading programs. Given a variable of interest, we locate the statements across the estate that define and modify it, aggregate the conditions that govern it, and assemble the logic into a coherent rule rather than a scattering of fragments.

• Application overview and code inventory, with navigable flowcharts
• Identification of variables of interest and the statements that define them
• Conditions of interest established and the governing logic aggregated
• Rules expressed in a readable vocabulary, so business people can confirm whether they are correct
• Export in an executable rules format where you want the logic to run in a rules engine
• Every rule traceable to the program and line it came from

Why the traceability matters here

A recovered rule that nobody can verify is a liability.