Business Rules on Trial: Exploring hindrances in validation of Natural Language Business Rules

The ability for organizations to respond to change has become ever more important in today's rapidly changing macro environment. The Business Rules Approach, a relatively new Information Systems Development methodology, promises business agility through the focus on and use of Business Rules. Business Rules are to be stated in natural language, so that they can be accessed and validated by people without technical experience. The easy validation of Business Rules by non-technical business users is a fundamental, but largely untested, claim and assumption in the Business Rules Approach. This thesis employs an experiment where eight librarian business experts were exposed to natural language Business Rules in order to find out if any problems arise when the said business experts attempted validation. The data was collected by conducting interviews in conjunction with the experiment, resulting in the conclusion that there were no major hindrances to validation of natural language Business Rules. The business experts in the study were able to go beyond validation of Business Rules by correcting erroneous Business Rules, suggesting corrections to Business Rules and in rare cases suggest structural changes to Business Rules.