Analyzing Activities › Dependency Analysis

Dependency Analysis

Dependency analysis is a powerful technique for refining the content and structure of the activity hierarchy by showing how the executions of processes are related. It indicates which processes must be executed to complete some parts of the activities of the business before execution of other activities, and when they must be performed.

A meaningful dependency analysis also identify:

• Providers of information who can facilitate the execution of processes
• Receivers of information that the processes produce
• Events that enable the execution of processes. See the chapter "Event Analysis" for more information.

This analysis can uncover opportunities for executing activities in parallel, shortening the time that is taken for the business to respond to demands placed on it.

Dependency analysis also helps to identify and validate entity states.

Dependencies between sibling processes are modeled. However, it is not possible, or necessary, to show all possible dependencies between elementary processes that belong to different parent activities.

You verify decomposition by verifying that all sibling processes are interdependent. If they are not, this strongly indicates that the decomposition still be improved. You have not discovered all the sibling processes, have incorrectly grouped processes that should not be siblings, or have erroneously identified an activity as a process.

In a few cases, siblings are not interdependent, but such cases must be regarded with suspicion. Always resolve or explain any anomalies to ensure that elementary processes are correctly identified. Only then can designers correctly implement systems to support the processes.

Dependencies between processes are identified and recorded by building Process Dependency Diagrams using CA Gen Activity Dependency Tool.