Analyzing Interactions

Interaction analysis involves exploring how entity types are affected by elementary processes, and how elementary processes use entity types and their attributes and relationships.

The business model that is developed during analysis integrates three equally important aspects of business requirements:

Data aspect of the model, which describes things of interest to the business and the relationships between them. See the chapter "Analyzing Data."
Activity aspect of the model, which records things the business does, or should do. See the chapter "Analyzing Activities."
Interaction aspect of the model, which details how things the business does (activities) affect things of interest to the business (data).

This aspect serves to confirm, and if necessary modify, the analysis model. It also provides a detailed basis for system design.

Interaction analysis exploits and refines the expected effects of processes on entity types. To represent this use in more detail, two distinct types of analysis are performed:

Entity type life-cycle analysis
Entity type life-cycle analysis approaches interactions from the point of view of an entity type: "Which processes use entities of this type?"
Process logic analysis

Process logic analysis approaches interactions from the point of view of a process: "How are entities that are affected by this particular process?"

Interactions between processes and entity types can be used to group them together in clusters. Clustering is used to produce or confirm groupings of entity types into subject areas, and processes into functions, or scoped into business systems, each of which become the subject of a system development project.

Two further techniques can be used to analyze interactions between activities, data, and elements of the organization, where these interactions are critical to the development of systems:

Role analysis

You can use role analysis when a system must be designed to fully support specific user activities. This is often the case where client/server applications are to be provided.

Distribution analysis

You can use distribution analysis where there is a potential need for distributed solutions; therefore, identify where processes and entities are used to help choose the structure of these solutions.

During interaction analysis, you consider only those elementary processes that have been selected as part of a business system for immediate development. To be confident that the business requirements are understood and can be supported by the planned system, you apply these detailed analysis techniques to the most complex elementary processes. As a guideline, consider any process that interacts with more than four entity types.