Data Bricklaying Diary

Aug 13, 2026 · Backend Development

Where Do Business Rules Belong? A Framework for Atomic Rule Placement

This article proposes decomposing business policies into atomic rules—semantic definitions, fact constraints, disposition strategies, process rules, and transaction invariants—and assigning each to its appropriate engineering carrier (ontology, validation, decision service, workflow, or code) based on what it constrains and who owns the outcome, unified by a policy catalog linking versions and implementations.