Ron Ross’ latest edition of his guidebook, Business Rule Concepts, expands further on the relationship between enforcable business rules and the events that cause their evaluation.
Ron uses the example of a business rule that might apply in a workflow: “a customer must be assigned to an agent if the customer has placed an order”.
This rule needs to be evaluated on the event: “Customer places order”.
But equally it applies when: “Agent leaves” (or becomes unavailable).
And also to: “Customer order is cancelled”
… although usually this sort of exception would probably be covered by a business rule too.
Ron’s term for these “events derived from business rules” are “flash points”, citing “a business rule generally produces 2 or more flash points when it needs to be evaluated”. This is useful for mapping (or modelling) from business rules to the relevant events one needs to be concerned with.
Probably more importantly, this also shows a short cut for researchers looking to automate the transformations from such business rules to IT systems. Simply (a) identify the affecting events (sorry, “flash points”) and (b) use these events to drive an evaluation of the rule concerned. The latter of course is ideally suited to some highly scalable event-based rules engine …
