While the Data Model Diagram describes the things, which are of interest to a business, the Activity Hierarchy Diagram describes the actions the business takes with those things. For instance, a business can be interested in something called an Order. In fact, the more orders a business has, the better. However, what does the business do with Orders? Typically they Accept Order, Approve Order, Pick Order, Pack Order, Ship Order, and Invoice Order. In addition, only on rare occasions, they have to Cancel Order. These business activities are documented on an Activity Hierarchy Diagram.
The term activity is somewhat generic. It can mean either a function or a process. However, the terms function and process have specific meanings in CA Gen, and we will look at them in a moment.
Activity analysis involves the continued decomposition of activities until the analyst has identified the lowest-level processes of interest to the business. Functions decompose into either lower-level functions or higher-level processes. Higher-level processes decompose into lower-level processes. The decomposition ends when the analyst has uncovered all of the lowest-level processes of interest to the business. These lowest-level processes are known as elementary processes.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we started doing Data Analysis. However, we could have begun doing Activity Analysis. In fact, since one complements or confirms the other, they should be done in parallel.
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