Promoting business policies in object-oriented methods

Business policies have been proposed to bridge the gap between business and information system professionals, and at the same time, for easing system evolution. So far, however, most approaches to business policies have been biased towards providing a structural perspective. Here, we argue that there is much to be gained from moving the business-policy idea to a behavioral setting such as the one used in most object-oriented methods. This paper proposes a division of behavioral domain features into two orthogonal dimensions depending an the stability of these features: the event dimension which mainly corresponds to state-transition diagrams that are rarely changed, and the policy dimension which describes restrictions and dependencies among elements on the event dimension that routinely evolve with time. This explicit and separate description of business policies allows the changing of these policies without impacting unnecessarily on the underlying domain, thus easing requirement modifications and finally, enhancing software evolution. The paper addresses policy identification, description and implementation. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.