Analyzing Interactions › Process Logic Analysis

Process Logic Analysis

During entity type life-cycle analysis, you focus on one entity type at a time, describing the effects of various processes on entities of that type.

During process logic analysis, you change their frame of reference to elementary processes. You focus on one elementary process at a time, and gradually evolve a deeper understanding by describing its effects on various entity types and detailing the attributes that are used.

The following illustration shows these two perspectives on the interaction between data and activities.

The illustration does not show all the processes that affect order, nor does it show all the entity types that are affected by Take Order, hence the dashed lines. Still, the illustration shows that during entity type life-cycle analysis, the process Take Order is only one of the processes that affect the life-cycle of the entity type order.

During process logic analysis, the entity type order is only one of the entity types with which the process Take Order must deal.

You can use a comparison of these viewpoints to confirm the correctness of the business model, because both viewpoints must be compatible. The use of different perspectives on the interaction model improves the understanding of the business model by both the analyst and the user. The main purpose is to provide a starting point for procedure design.

CA Gen can be used to record the expected effects of processes on entity types, as described in the chapter "Analyzing Activities." Here you can exploit and refine that detail.

CA Gen currently supports one viewpoint for process logic analysis, and one tool for its accomplishment, the Process Action Diagram. This diagram allows the analyst to specify a detailed interaction analysis from a single perspective.

The Process Action Diagram has two main elements:

• Information Views

  Information views are definitions of the entities that are seen by a process. These views can be defined by detailing a process, in the Activity Hierarchy, or in a Dependency Diagram. They can also be entered into the Process Action Diagram.

• Actions

  Statements describing actions, or formal rigorous statements of the actions that are performed by a process, can be:

  • Entered under the guidance of the Action Diagram Tool
  • Expanded from the expected effects of a process when the Action Diagram is first entered
  • Generated as part of a complete process using the process synthesis command

Analyzing information views and developing a full Process Action Diagram requires a rigor that is more appropriate to the design of systems procedures than to analysis, and it can consume a great amount of time. It is useful to develop action diagrams to define and agree complex business logic, verify the ability of data to support it, and associate it with a specific entity type. This allows action diagrams that support operations on an entity type to be displayed using the Data Model Browser tool.

Decide whether to develop action diagrams and to what level of detail. You also decide to define information views for complex processes only.

Important! Perform process logic analysis only on elementary processes, not on their parent processes. In the remainder of this chapter, the term process denotes an elementary process only, unless the text makes an explicit distinction.