All,
Ive been in IT a long time. Ive noticied that what was once an easy and straight forward endeavour has now become complicated and bloated. Im talking about Business Analysis. There was a time when we captured user requirements, analysed then, created computer specifications (data and process), and some bright spark would write a computer program/system which consisted of data and algorithm(processes). Fast forward to today and most of our BA activities are still within the IT domain, yet we dont do data and process anymore, we seem to focus on process.
With all the new process tools it seems that data is often forgotten. People create very fancy process diagrams but do not show any data being used as input or output or data being consumed (ala IDEF0, IDEF1).
Went for an interview the otherday and the Lead Business Analyst had no idea/clue about the data requirements and its inter-relationships. No wonder the project is way behind and they've had multiple BAs and Project managers on the job. Its worrisome!
Perhaps I'm fretting over nothing; but what do you think?
warm regards,
K
Dear K:
I am also of the same vintage...over 40 years in IT (early projects were in instrumentation and industrial automation).
The DFD & Process orientation has shifted to OOAD in which data and processing (functions and operations) modeling are integrated. To my understanding, broader aspects of subsystems and interrelations are better handled in OOAD. Actual processing still exists but as functions within an object or class. I see that Sequence Diagrams and Communication diagrams do preserve the dataflows except that they are referred to as "messages with arguments / return values". I actually find that OOAD facilitates modeling and design of more complicated systems systematically.
You are welcome to explore more issues of OOAD UML. [email protected]
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