Extraction of Conditional Statements for Understanding Business Rules

In the maintenance of a business system, developers must understand the computational business rules implemented in the system. Computational business rules define how an output value of a feature is computed from inputs, the rules are represented by conditional statements in the source code. Unfortunately, understanding business rules is a tedious and error-prone activity. Since a feature computes various outputs, developers must analyze the implementation of the feature and extract the conditional statements relevant to a particular output. In this paper, we propose a program dependence analysis technique tailored for understanding business rules. Given a variable representing an output, our approach extracts conditional statements that may affect the computation of the output. To evaluate the usefulness of the approach, we conducted an experiment with eight developers in a company. The results showed that our approach enables developers to accurately identify conditional statements relevant to business rules.