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Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture By David C. Hay | |
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The activities dimension of the Architecture Framework is concerned with what the enterprise does . Specifically, what kinds of transformations of material and information take place in the course of doing business? What are the enterprise's activities in carrying out its mission? The modeling of an enterprise's activities is somewhat less coherent than the modeling of its data, because there are many very different ways of viewing activities. The object-oriented world tends to view the activity and data columns together. Certainly in object-oriented design the activities are designed as adjuncts to the code which defines the data in object classes. In analysis, that is possible to some degree, although it is still useful to address business activities in their own right. These tend to be discovered when you interview someone and ask "What do you do?" Once activities have been modeled separately, a function/entity type matrix (showing what activities create, retrieve, update, or delete occurrences of each entity) can be used to determine which activities go with each entity. Unfortunately the terms "process", "function", and "activity" are often used interchangeably, and worse still, different authors define the terms slightly differently. The following definitions, however, are close enough to most people's usage to be satisfactory for our purposes. These definitions will be the basis for the rest of this book.
So, while this chapter might be thought to be about "process modeling", to be more rigorous here it will be called "activity modeling". This chapter will describe several different approaches to modeling processes and functions. A summary of the different characteristics of each technique is provided at the end of the chapter. It would be nice to be able simply to adopt the best features of each, but unfortunately, use of any of these techniques requires a graphic tool (a "CASE" tool). Tools are available for almost all the techniques described here, but no one tool supports more than one or two, so it is not currently possible to adopt a superset. Invariably you will be required by circumstances and corporate politics [1] to use only one of the techniques and endure its shortcomings. From this book you will at least be able to tell what those are in advance.
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