Towards an Improvement of Software Development Processes through Standard Business Rules

The automation of software development processes is a desirable goal of current software companies which would lead to a cost reduction in software production. This automation is the backbone of approaches such as Model Driven Architecture (MDA) or Software Factories. This paper proposes the use of standard Business Rules (using Rules Interchange Format, RIF) to specify application functionality along with a platform to produce automatic implementations for them. The novelty of this proposal is to introduce Business Rules at all levels of MDA architecture in a software development process, providing a supporting tool where production Business Rules are considered at every abstraction level. Production Business Rules are represented through standard languages, rule engine vendor independence is assured via automatic transformation between rule languages, and Business Rules reuse is made possible. The objective is to get the development of production Business Rules closer to non-technical people involved in the software development process through the use of natural language processing approaches, automatic transformations among models and semantic web languages such as Ontology Web Language (OWL).