Usability of the Business Rules Specification Languages

Business rules are used to define or limit certain aspects of business. While they should be understandable for different interested parties, including business analysts, end-users, programmers, or testers, it is also highly recommendable that computers efficiently process them. Business rules can be expressed using different languages (styles), potentially influencing their quality. The main aim of this research is to determine which of the business rule specification notations used at early stages of software development (CIM level) is the best for different groups of recipients. The paper presents the results of the experiment designed to compare the usability of two business rule specification languages: SBVR SP (Polish version of SBVR SE), and RuleSpeak®. These languages have very similar expressiveness and scope of application. Both introduce some restrictions on word order (grammar) and expressions used. Their usability was assessed from three perspectives: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The study was conducted on three groups of participants representing various user groups. It occurred that SBVR SP is more useful than RuleSpeak.