Business rules are an essential and omnipresent building block in nearly every business process. Business rules define how a company's business works by describing business policies or key business decisions. So, they are the fundament on which the business logic and processes are built. Thus, rules should be considered as shareable and centrally managed BPM artifacts like other essential resources, such as service and data descriptions, used in the context of defining process-driven architectures.

Ideally, the management of business rules is done centrally and independently from the business flow logic, for example, in a Business Rules Management System (BRMS). The separation of the decision logic from the business process flow logic is essential to ensure comprehensibility and flexibility of business processes.

Unfortunately, the decision logic is often implemented as part of the business process flow logic today! Within this chapter, we will show why this is not...