Glossary

Business Analyst (BA)

Someone whose responsibility it is to understand the business context of any requirement for change or enhancement to a business system, and who is able to express those requirements in a precise, testable, solution-independent way that can be understood by business and suppliers alike

Business System

The combination of processes, data, rules, roles and operational procedures which together fulfil a specific business purpose.

Business System Option (BSO)

When the high level business requirements are understood, there will be a number of ways in which they can be met – some aspects may make sense to be catered for by an automated (e.g. computer) system and some by a purely manual solution.

A business system option is a sensible mix, developed with heavy business involvement and supported by a cost benefit analysis, outline plan and DFM/LDM showing scope of the option.

Dataflow Diagram (DFD)

A structured set of diagrams with higher level processes decomposed into their lower level processed

Dataflow Model (DFM)

A set of dataflow diagrams decomposed to their lowest level, with each elementary process described and its details documented. These will cover non-functional aspects such as volumes and security. Each flow that crosses the system boundary has its content, source and destination documented.

Entity

A “something” in which the business is interested and about which information is to be recorded – e.g. Product, Order, Bank Account. Each will have attributes like product description, order date, account limit.

Appears on Logical Data Structure diagrams and are cross referenced to datastores.

External Entity

A source or recipient of data outside the system boundary – e.g. Customer Service Rep, Bank, Account Manager

Elementary Process / Elementary Process Description (EPD)

Each lowest-level process on the dataflow diagrams is known as an Elementary Process and is described in the dataflow model.

Function Definition (FD)

This is the beginning of the end of the maintained DFM. It brings together all the elementary processes from the DFM into related, sequenced groups to support the processing the way the users see the whole thing working “on the ground”.