A rule architect has to develop with the business users what will be the rule life cycle. There are a lot of different possibilities for defining this rule life cycle. For the implementation point of view we need to define a "Status" meta property attached to a rule element. The following states have been identified as a simple but still efficient life cycle:

·               New: the rule is created, and can be modified by its owner

·               Defined: the rule has been defined and is currently in unit test

·               Rejected: the rule has been tested un-successfully

·               Validated: the rule has been tested successfully and can be deployed

·               Promoted: the rule has been part of a rule set deployed on production platform

·               Retired: the rule was deployed or validated on a production platform but no more active.

In the state diagram below the following abbreviations are used:

• Rule Writer or Rule Author is the end user of the BRMS application
• Rule Admin is an administrator of the rule set.
• Rule Tester can be an automatic process or a human.