Business Rules were made to change!
When was the last time you worked for or consulted at a company with stable business rules? If such a company existed, no one would ever transfer to another department. There would be no promotions (actually, I have heard that a few times). The company would always use the same suppliers, and they would have the same customers - year after year - with their needs and interests never changing.
Consider these examples:
- Ann Jones is responsible for the I.T. department (governance)
- The database must be backed up between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., 7 days each week. (systems)
- State and county sales tax of 6.5 percent is to be collected for all merchandise shipped to Florida addresses. (calculations)
But people move from job to job, and software is constantly upgraded, and it has been a while since tax laws were carved on stone tablets.
This volatility means two things to the Business Analyst. First - that beautiful requirements document with all of the detail you so faithfully captured will be out of date soon after the final signature is scribbled on the last page. In fact, the signature page is probably out of date as well.
If you must produce a document, produce it from a repository. Select the always-volatile rules from some form of database... even a spreadsheet... and if possible distribute it via an intranet rather than killing yet another tree.
If volatility causes the need for a repository, then it also brings the need for organization. If the repository is not organized, you won't be able to search and update and extract business rules. If it is poorly organized, the business rules will not trace to data and functional requirements.
The suggestion is, then, record your business rules as data, and organize them using some sort of taxonomy. Maybe develop a hierarchy based on the company organization, or based on your enterprise data model, or simply a hierarchy of tasks. Regardless of the form of organization, find a way to link business rules to functional requirements and to data elements. The home page of my web site, gpond.com kind of illustrates this.
