Activity: Detail a Business Entity

Determine Areas of Responsibility

Collect all business use-case realizations in which the business entity participates. Make sure you have access to descriptions of business workers that access the business entity, as well as to descriptions of other business entities that have some relationship to it. The Responsibility Description of the business entity must include the entity’s role in the business, as well as its lifecycle from creation to deletion. You can document the lifecycle with a statechart diagram (see Guidelines: Statechart Diagrams in the Business Analysis Model).

Define Operations

Decide what operations the business entity should have. Base your decisions on the operations of the business entity within each business use-case realization in which it participates. These operations provide tools for the business workers to access the business entity. Briefly describe each operation.

Finalize the Responsibility Description, and explain how all operations are related, including the business entity’s lifecycle.

See also Guidelines: Business Entity, the discussion on operations.

Define Attributes

Identify and briefly describe the attributes of the business entity. Attributes are either properties of the business entity or any information that it requires to perform its responsibilities that is not another business entity. An item of information that needs to be determined or calculated (on-demand) must be presented in the form of an operation, rather than as an attribute of the business entity. Attributes represent persistent properties of the business entity.

See also Guidelines: Business Entity, the discussion of attributes.

Inspect the business entity’s operations. Candidate business events include significant changes of state (for example, a target that changes  from tracking to locked, or a proposal that changes from proposed to accepted). Operations that trigger these changes of state might send these business events. Also consider what business actors, business workers, or other business entities should be notified of the business event. Inspect the business entity’s relationships with other business entities. Are there any important changes in these related entities of which the business entity should be notified?

Analyze Relationships

Review all relationships (association, dependency, generalization) in which the business entity participates. Are the purposes and semantics of these relationships clear? Be wary of many generalization relationships among business entities. Determine whether these relationships are really necessary to the performance of the business entity’s responsibilities. Also confirm that the business entity does indeed have all the necessary relationships.

Evaluate Your Results

Review and discuss the business entity with other members of the team and appropriate stakeholders, so that they have a clear understanding of the business entity and agree on its description.

See also Guidelines: Business Entity and checkpoints for business entities in Activity: Review Business Analysis Model.