The purpose of Activity Decomposition is to identify all of the elementary processes associated with a selected portion of the business. Elementary processes are the smallest unit of business activity that has meaning to the business and when complete, leave the business in a consistent state.
In the following example, Contract Doctor is a process that has a start, an end, and does useful work. However, it is not the lowest-level process of meaning to this business. Contract Doctor can be broken down into lower-level processes, each of which have a start, an end, and perform meaningful work. In this case, the steps to complete the higher level of work include:
Each step performs meaningful work for the business, can and do happen at different times and are performed by different people, and leave the business in a consistent state
The phrase "leave the business in a consistent state" has several points to it, but at a minimum, it means that none of the optionality rules as depicted in the data model are violated by an execution of the process. In other words, if an attribute value or relationship membership is mandatory, then that attribute will have its value set or that relationship membership will be created by the end of the execution of the process.
When processes cannot be broken down into lower-level processes without violating some of the guidelines discussed in the previous paragraph, they are considered elementary processes and marked as such in their properties. This causes a dashed line to appear on them as shown in the following example.
The process action diagram (PAD) will eventually contain pseudo-code specifying the business rules associated with that business activity.
Note: Each elementary process has an action diagram associated with it.
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