This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Software Engineering, Inc. will investigate applicability and refinement of program analysis tools to domain-specific business rule extraction. A business rule is a declarative description of how an entity of a company's business process is defined. A program slice with respect to a variable reference consists of all program statements that potentially affect the value of the variable at that reference. Slicing has obvious relevance to business rule extraction, but requires refinement and elaboration if it is to be incorporated into a reengineering environment that interactively assists an analyst identifying business rules. Slices are often too large and too inaccurate. This project will explore methods to restrict slices based on domain knowledge expressed as domain-specific typing rules and will filter slices based on syntactic and semantic constraints specified by the analyst. The modern computer environment of client-server architectures, internet and intranet capabilities, component support for enterprise-wide computing, and platform-independent systems afford a significant competitive advantage to the companies that exploit these capabilities. Technology derived from this investigation can assist in this reengineering task.
