Relating evolving business rules to software design

In order to remain useful, it is important for software to evolve according to the changes ill its business environment. Business rules, which can be used to represent both user requirements and conditions to which the system should conform. are considered as the most volatile part in today's software applications. Their changes bring high impact on both the business processes and the software itself. In this paper, we start our discussion with the recent approaches in evolvable software system that consider business rule as an integral aspect of their model. Next we describe our approach that consists of a model that links business rules and software design. The link model is intended to improve requirements traceability in software design, as well as minimizing the efforts of software changes due to the changes of business rules. XML DTD is used to specify the metamodel of our solution for automation and portability purposes. Finally, we briefly discuss the future developments of the current research.