An Architecture to Infer Business Rules from Event Condition Action Rules Implemented in the Persistence Layer

The business rules that govern the behaviour of a business process can be hardcoded in different ways in a software application. The modernization or improvement of these applications to a process-oriented perspective implies typically the modification of the business rules. Frequently, legacy systems are not well documented, and almost always the documentation they have is not updated. As a consequence, many times it is necessary to analyze the source code and databases structures to transform them into a business language more understandable by the business experts involved in the modernization process. Database triggers are one of the artefacts in which business rules are hardcoded. The authors focus on this kind of artefact, having in mind to avoid the manual analysis of the triggers by a database expert and bringing it closer to business experts. To achieve this, they need to discover business rules that are hardcoded in triggers and translate them into vocabularies that are commonly used by business experts. In this chapter, the authors propose an ADM-based architecture to discover business rules and rewrite them into a language that can be understood by the business experts.