How to design rules and how to organize them

As mentioned earlier, rules are an elementary part of business processes within a company. So, the challenge is to identify the rules, separate them from the business flow logic, and organize them as services in an SOA-based style to ensure consistency and business agility. This approach sounds easy, but it isn't, as we will see in the following paragraphs.

Discovering rules

Identifying potential candidates for business rules within a business process seems quite simple because potential indicators for decision points are expressed as control structures, such as gateways in a BPMN 2.0 process or if activities in a BPEL 2.0 process. Other potential rule candidates might be found at code locations where decision preparations or complex calculation rules are implemented. However, these are only a few possibilities; in the real world, business rules are omnipresent. The use of the designation rule candidate is conscious since not all identified locations...