An automated tool for business rule-driven, object-oriented software evolution

Abstract

In order to remain useful, it is important for software to evolve according to the changes in its business environment. The changes of highly volatile requirements, i.e. business rules, may even occur prior to system implementation. In this paper, we present an automated tool that supports the Business Rule-Driven Object-Oriented Design (BROOD) approach in propagating business rule changes to software design. We firstly introduce the BROOD approach that consists of a metamodel that defines the semantics and syntax of business rules statements and links these rules to their related software design components. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is adopted to define the software design part of the metamodel. We also describe the design and implementation of our automated tool using Generic Modeling Environment (GME).