Extracting Business Rules Using a Partitioned Forward Slicing Approach

Our work deals with the process of extracting rules and logic from business systems during the maintenance phase of software development. The rules and logic thus extracted may be useful in re-engineering, re-use and reverse engineering. We have proposed an approach based on a particular type of program slicing named partitioned forward slicing, which helps to identify the rules and logic spread over the code. The paper not only stresses the need for applying partitioned forward slicing in business applications, but also discusses the relevance of other slicing methods. An appealing aspect of this work is that, the proposed approach simplifies the maintenance phase of commercial software development, making it more direct and effective. This is of great use in commercial applications as maintenance phase is critical to the process. Some samples which highlight the flexibility of the proposed slicing method are also provided to affirm the significance of this work.