Extracting business rules

Edit online

Discover and extract business rules from COBOL, PL/I, and Assembler programs.

IBM® Bob Premium Package for Z analyzes business-critical code units and generates detailed business rule insights that are integrated into the program documentation.

Note: This feature is part of the Documentation generation workflow. To view the extracted business rules of a program, you must initiate the Documentation Generation workflow for that program.

How to extract business rules

To extract business rules, complete the following steps:

  1. Open IBM Bob workspace with all extensions installed.
  2. In the IBM Bob chat window, click the Start Workflow icon (Play button), select Generate documentation, and then click Start.
  3. Select the program files or folders containing the programs you want to document and click Continue with selection.
  4. System prepares selected programs, retrieve expanded sources and leverages data dictionary (if available), and extracts business rules. It performs the following tasks to extract the business rules:
    • Performing classification
    • Extracting business rules
  5. The system generates documentation at the location, /docs/program/{relative-path-to-program}/{program-name}.md.

    Each program business rule contains title, description, decisions, code, and references. The extracted business rules are located in the Business Rules section of the program documentation.

Note: You can also extract business rules using Bob shell-based Z Understand Linux container. See Generating documentation using Bob shell-based Z Understand Linux container.