Business rules discovery from existing software systems

Abstract

Software maintenance consumes a large amount of its total life cycle costs. In fact, maintainers spend a lot of time analyzing source code, configurations and resource definitions referring to the documentation in order to gain a deeper understanding of the logic of business rules implemented in the system. To facilitate these activities, we propose a model-driven approach on business rules discovery from existing software systems. We describe the process for obtainment of standard based intermediate representation of knowledge about the software system and for abstraction of business logic from this representation. We believe that our on-going research on discovering business rules will decrease the efforts required for maintenance and evolution of software systems.