A model-based approach for extracting business rules out of legacy information systems

• Main Author: Cosentino, Valerio
• Language: English
• Published: Ecole des Mines de Nantes 2013
• Subjects: [SPI:OTHER] Engineering Sciences/Other; [SPI:OTHER] Sciences de l'ingénieur/Autre; Model driven engineering; Business rules extraction; Reverse engineering
• Online Access: http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00984763; http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/98/47/63/PDF/Cosentino_V_12_2013.pdf

Today's business world is very dynamic and organizations have to quickly adjust their internal policies to follow the market changes. Such adjustments must be propagated to the business logic embedded in the organization's information systems, that are often legacy applications not designed to represent and operationalize the business logic independently from the technical aspects of the programming language employed. Consequently, the business logic buried in the system must be discovered and understood before being modified. Unfortunately, such activities slow down the modification of the system to new requirements settled in the organization policies and threaten the consistency and coherency of the organization business. In order to simplify these activities, we provide amodel-based approach to extract and represent the business logic, expressed as a set of business rules, from the behavioral and structural parts of information systems. We implement such approach for Java, COBOL and relational database management systems. The proposed approach is based on Model Driven Engineering,that provides a generic and modular solution adaptable to different languages by offering an abstract and homogeneous representation of the system.