Many business analysts mix structured techniques with UML and use events as the entry point to their analysis activity.
An event can be any activity, action or business process where the system under investigation needs to respond. In this approach to business analysis, once the scope of the system has been identified, the first deliverable is a table (a list) of events.
Event-based analysis aligns very well with UML and object-oriented development as both are based on how a system responds to an event. For example, use case diagrams model system responses when an actor initiates an interaction with a system.
Events can be of different types (external, time dependant, internal to a system) and requirements analysis begins with the identification and documentation of these events.
As mentioned, each event describes a condition – a piece of functionality. The system under development must have the capability to successfully process the event.
Each event can be thought of as a functional or non-functional requirement and a typical Business Requirements Document could contain dozens or even hundreds of individual events. Once we’ve defined an event we can further analyse and model the process itself using any one of a number of modelling techniques.
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