Using ISO 9000 to elicit business rules

Business rules have been largely used in database modeling and more recently in the field of information technology, but rarely in requirements engineering. This article focuses on business rules as prescribed procedures that should be followed to achieve the business's goals. The ISO 9000 documentation includes policies, procedures and instructions to assure the final product's conformance with ISO 9000 requirements. Partly for this reason, it is contended that ISO 9000 standards and associated documents can be of a great help for business rule elicitation. The authors' main contribution is to propose a conceptual model for not only eliciting business rules, but also integrating them into a software requirements baseline model. This proposal uses ISO 9000 characteristics and integrates them with the idea of natural language-based requirements description.