Removing Ambiguity in Business Rules
Blog: Decision Management Community
In his recent article “Being Unambiguous Beyond Reasonable Doubt in Expressing Rules” Ron Ross gave an example of the kind of ambiguity that policy interpreters, business analysts, and IT professionals deal with daily. It’s a sentence from the California 2014 Paid Sick Leave Policy: “Accrued paid sick leave shall carry over to the following year of employment and may be capped at 48 hours or 6 days.” Let’s look at the ambiguities:
- What is being capped? Is it the amount of accrued paid sick leave in a given period or the amount of sick leave that may be carried forward?
- What is meant by “may be”? … Must be? … Can be but need not be?
These ambiguities must be wrung out of the statement to get a clear interpretation (i.e., unambiguous beyond a reasonable doubt). The key to disambiguation is forming the right questions to ask. A good reader of formal messages ‘sees’ the questions that should be asked. A good writer of formal messages avoids them in the first place.
Ron states: “By ‘being unambiguous’ I do not mean being unambiguous beyond all doubt in every aspect of natural language. No! I stipulate up-front that’s impossible (and probably not even desirable). By ‘being unambiguous’ I mean removing ambiguity beyond a reasonable doubt in formal communication including rules.” Link
P.S. It is interesting to note that our Challenge “Paid Sick Leave Requirements” remains without a solution since March 2020. Could anybody ponder the challenge?
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