Book excerpt: From a bestselling author and expert--a soon-to-be classic on application development Representing a significant change of focus in software engineering, the business rule approach to application development benefits all decision makers. Managers looking to take advantage of new opportunities will turn to business rules to implement change. IT has already learned the benefits of separating data by processing and managing data as an independent component of systems. A rules-extended development approach does exactly the same thing for business rules: by reducing the amount of code that needs to be written, it shortens the time necessary to implement change. Bestselling author Barbara von Halle (The Handbook of Relational Database Design from Addison Wesley) presents the first book to show in practical, real-world terms how to build applications using business rule concepts and techniques. This authoritative guide will give readers: o Complete guidance for system designers and database managers o The motivation for using the business rule approach o Techniques for discovering and managing rules o Guidance on how to conduct rule analysis o Steps for designing the implementation options of the rules, as well as designing workflow and database components