Simulation-Driven Approach for Business Rules Discovery

Business rules are everywhere. Some of these rules are implicit and thus poorly enforced, others are written but not enforced, and still others are perhaps poorly written and obscurely enforced. In this work, we propose an interactive, simulation-driven approach for the discovery of business rules. The rules are first specified in a natural language, then translated to the Alloy specification language. The Alloy Analyzer tool is used as a platform for rule simulation and discovery: it provides a domain specialist with an instant feedback, helping her to detect the issues with the existing business rules and to discover new rules in a systematic way.