Human factors in extracting business rules from legacy systems

Business rules are operational rules based on data that business organizations follow to perform various activities. Systems that implement business rules are updated when the organization change to meet new business needs or to follow the change of laws. Over time, the documentation of systems would become inconsistent with system behaviour. Thus software code becomes a more reliable source than any available documentation to obtain business rules. Currently, extracting business rules from legacy systems is heavily dependent on human interaction and steering. Though there are tools to assist the extraction, it is not a fully automated process. So it is very important to analyze the human factors, which have never been summarized or analyzed in this field. This work would analyze human factors in every procedure of extracting business rules from legacy systems. These human factors have been proved in extracting business rules from a financial legacy system.