Business Logic Development Pitfalls
In previous chapters, we defined business logic very narrowly and very deliberately: business logic decides which state a business process enters next.
This definition is much more limited than what is commonly called “business logic” in everyday software development practice.
The most common business logic pitfall is giving it responsibilities that belong to other logic layers.
In many software systems, the term business logic is used as a catch-all label. Any code that does not clearly belong to the user interface or the database is often placed into a “business logic layer”.
As a result, business logic is frequently expected to:
While these activities are important, they are not business logic in the sense used in this book.
When business logic absorbs responsibilities from other layers, several problems emerge:
Over time, the “business logic layer” turns into a general-purpose container for everything that does not fit elsewhere.
In Business Process Programming, business logic has a single, focused responsibility.
Business logic evaluates the outcome of a transition and selects the next state of the business process according to business rules.
It does not:
Those responsibilities belong to data access logic, data processing logic, and state logic respectively.
This pitfall appears because many architectures are not built around explicit business process states.
When states and transitions are not clearly modeled, decision-making becomes scattered across the system, and business logic naturally expands to fill the gaps.
By keeping business logic focused on state selection only, the structure of the business process remains visible, testable, and adaptable to change.
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