Millions of income tax returns are calculated with BRM software that is generated from business rules: the Dutch Tax and Custom Authority (DTCA) uses BRM technology for critical applications.

At the DTCA business rules (based on tax law and regulations) are specified in RegelSpraak (the Dutch version of RuleSpeak). A set of best practices is available for business analysts to transform relevant tax law and tax regulation into RegelSpraak. This is supported by software that facilitates traceability. RegelSpraak rules are put into our language workbench (ALEF) together with test cases. These test cases can be evaluated in ALEF even before working software is available. ALEF is capable of generating software that can be directly used in production environments.

We will show how this is implemented at the DTCA and the lessons learned. We will also pay attention to our pitfalls and further improvements.

Learning Objectives:

• Get an idea of how BRM is implemented at the DTCA.
• An understanding of the best practices that are used to specify rules in RegelSpraak
• An understanding how software is generated on the basis of RegelSpraak
• A clear understanding how specifying rules and test cases improve the development process.
• Understand how BRM benefits from new technologies (dsl’s, model driven software engineering)