SBVR-based Business Rule Creation for Legacy Programs using Variable Provenance

Functionality of a software system that implements business operations can be captured using business processes and rules. To understand the 'as-is' processes and rules, the source-code is arguably the best source of knowledge. We present a novel method that combines program analysis and domain knowledge to create the descriptions for "IT rules", as a critical step towards extracting business rules automatically. We introduce and use the concept of 'variable provenance' to propagate the domain descriptions into the source code to create Semantics of Business Vocabularies and Rules (SBVR) rules. In our experiments on sample, near-real-life systems, we could successfully annotate very large percentage (> 90%) of IT rules and enable to create SBVR rules. We present and describe the ProgAnnotator tool which is based on variable provenance and generates descriptions for IT rules in the source code and subsequently create SBVR rules automatically.