12th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Brussels, Belgium, July 20 - 24, 1998
	Workshop W7

Tools and Environments for Business Rules

Business rules are nothing new. They are used by every organisation to state their practices and policies. Every business application contains many business rules. Analysis and design models specify business rules without explicitly indicating them. Actual tools and environments for building business applications, however, provide little or no support to deal explicitly and automatically with business rules during the software life cycle.
This workshop focuses on tools and environments that handle the semantic content of business rules in an object-oriented environment. The main goal is to provide an overview of possible techniques (tools and methods) for the handling, definition and checking of these rules and the constraints expressed by them during design and development of object-oriented software.
Some of the purposes of this workshop are:

• the correct understanding of the state-of-art of tools capable of dealing with business rules in different environments (modelling tools and programming languages)
• controlling the evolution of business rules when the software changes
• the formulation of specifications for further enhancements