Author Topic: Which diagram is best to present system flow? (Read 8504 times)

sc_kew · « **on:** July 12, 2006, 07:23:06 pm »

Hi, everyone!

Recently my boss has asked me to draw a whole process flow for a system so that user can easy to understand what the system does. Which uml diagram should i use?

Please give me the advise on this matter. Thank you

sargasso · « **Reply #1 on:** July 12, 2006, 08:08:11 pm »

Whichever one he understands.

StefanPears · « **Reply #2 on:** July 13, 2006, 12:30:03 am »

Analysis- or activity-diagrams. Use actions for user or system activities, objects to show objects of the real world - like invoice or GUIs. Use alternate images to make the diagram boss-conform. Don't care about UML-rules by now. You can do that later on when you're going to communicate with IT-people.
Stefan

kelly_sumrall · « **Reply #3 on:** July 13, 2006, 05:13:08 am »

I recently created an activity diagram for a process flow similar to what Stefan suggested. The problem I ran into was when showing the printed black and white version to people, there was no clear distinction between user actions and system action. I did have the actions stereotyped (<<user>>, <<system>>), but they just blended in and served little use. I tried coloring the action elements, but that made some hard to read. Does anybody know of a practical solution to this.

Jan ´Bary´ Glas · « **Reply #4 on:** July 13, 2006, 05:27:30 am »

Quote

no clear distinction between user actions and system action.

I would use Partitions or Swimlanes. One for the actor, other for the system.

kelly_sumrall · « **Reply #5 on:** July 13, 2006, 05:34:39 am »

Excellent idea Barry. I think I'll give it a try.

sargasso · « **Reply #6 on:** July 13, 2006, 04:19:15 pm »

In this (kelly's) situation I have typically modelled only one side of the interaction as elements and the other side as links. For example, if I'm talking to users I model their side of the flow as activities or actions and the system side as control flows. If I'm taking to IT I draw the model the other way around, IOW the system stuff as activity and the user stuff as links.

About a year (?) ago I had a transform provided by one of the Sparxians that converted between the two i.e. nodes became edges and vv. This worked very well, but I dont seem to be able to lay my hands on it now.

bruce

p.s. what I (obliquely) meant by the first post is thart there is no correct answer to the question. The advice is to satisfy the needs of the poster's most important customer i.e. the "boss" who required this action - satisfy him and you have achieved the "correct" result.

TG · « **Reply #7 on:** August 11, 2006, 03:54:02 am »

In my opinion you should use Activity Diagram with Partitions and some UML objects with stereotypes (for example: document, database etc...).

Activity Diagram is quite understandable...nevertheless BPMN would be better...

Good luck:)

colinc · « **Reply #8 on:** August 13, 2006, 05:08:11 pm »

Related to this question,

I have a large collection of use cases that have been developed to represent each of the major activities within the new system.

I have found I really need to tie these together in a system flow and am thinking of the best way to do it. The UCs relatively match an Activity in an activity diagram, while I could replicate the information into Activity objects it seems redundent, and sure to result in information descrepencies.

The best solution would seem to be, place UCs on an Activity diagram and use this to show the workflow (I am meaning at a Cockburn sea level here, the detail is within the UCs). This all seems well but I cannot use any flow associations as it is not UML compliant.

Any ideas how to get around this, or is there a much more appropriate way to represent what I am trying to represent?

Thanks, Colin

Eve · « **Reply #9 on:** August 13, 2006, 05:45:49 pm »

Quote

About a year (?) ago I had a transform provided by one of the Sparxians that converted between the two i.e. nodes became edges and vv. This worked very well, but I dont seem to be able to lay my hands on it now.

Would that be http://sharepoint.knowledgerecovery.com/external/eaug/EA%20Code%20Generation%20Templates/invertGraph.xml?

I forgot all about that little experiment.

rehnlund · « **Reply #10 on:** September 26, 2006, 05:47:06 am »

Try the BPMN add-on and add UC connections as a Group with Instance Classifier pointing to my UC. In this way I can have one UC/Group span several activities in the BP flow.

Göran

Alessandro_C · « **Reply #11 on:** September 29, 2006, 05:39:34 am »

Quote

[...]

The best solution would seem to be, place UCs on an Activity diagram and use this to show the workflow (I am meaning at a Cockburn sea level here, the detail is within the UCs). This all seems well but I cannot use any flow associations as it is not UML compliant.

Any ideas how to get around this, or is there a much more appropriate way to represent what I am trying to represent?

Thanks, Colin

Have you tried using dependencies with <<flow>> stereotype? They can be drawn between use cases and beteween a use case and either an activity or an object.

Ale

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