Business Rules(From Wiki)

Definition:

     A business rule is a rule that defines or constrains some aspect of business and always resolves to either true or false. Business rules are intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business.Business rules describe the operations, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization.

Benefit:

    While a business rule may be informal or even unwritten, writing the rules down clearly and making sure that they don't conflict is a valuable activity.^{[citation needed]} When carefully managed, rules can be used to help the organization to better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty.

Categories of business rules

According to the white paper by the Business Rules Group,^[1] a statement of a business rule falls into one of four categories:

• Definitions of business terms

The most basic element of a business rule is the language used to express it. The very definition of a term is itself a business rule that describes how people think and talk about things. Thus, defining a term is establishing a category of business rule. Terms have traditionally been documented in a Glossary or as entities in a conceptual model.

• Facts relating terms to each other

The nature or operating structure of an organization can be described in terms of the facts that relate terms to each other. To say that a customer can place an order is a business rule, but a fact. Facts can be documented as natural language sentences or as relationships, attributes, and generalization structures in a graphical model.

• Constraints (also called "action assertions")

Every enterprise constrains behavior in some way, and this is closely related to constraints on what data may or may not be updated. To prevent a record from being made is, in many cases, to prevent an action from taking place.

• Derivations

Business rules (including laws of nature) define how knowledge in one form may be transformed into other knowledge, possibly in a different form.

Business rules are gathered in these situations:

1. When dictated by law
2. During the business analysis
3. As an ephemeral aid to engineers.

维护需求成本增加如果需求不断变动；业务规范化管理对于那些从业人员也是巨大的挑战

Business Rules Engines and Business Rules Management 两者的区别