Effects of quantitative measures on understanding inconsistencies in business rules

Abstract

Business Rules have matured to an important aspect in the development of organizations, encoding company knowledge as declarative constraints, aimed to ensure compliant business. The management of business rules is widely acknowledged as a challenging task. A problem here is a potential inconsistency of business rules, as business rules are often created collaboratively. To support companies in managing inconsistency, many works have suggested that a quantification of inconsistencies could provide valuable insights. However, the actual effects of quantitative insights in business rules management have not yet been evaluated. In this work, we present the results of an empirical experiment using eye-tracking and other performance measures to analyze the effects of quantitative measures on understanding inconsistencies in business rules. Our results indicate that quantitative measures are associated with better understanding accuracy, understanding efficiency and less mental effort in business rules management.