Book Image

UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial

Book Image

UML 2.0 in Action: A project-based tutorial

Overview of this book

Most books about UML describe it almost in its entirety. Inevitably you're left with only a superficial knowledge of the range of UML elements, without a deep and intuitive understanding of how to apply UML as a whole to real world design problems. This book doesn't set out to cover all of UML, but instead pulls together those parts of UML with immediate practical relevance and presents them as part of a coherent process for using UML in your actual development projects.This book is designed to be read while you work on a real project. After an initial review of the essentials of UML and the design process, it begins with the modeling of a business system and its business processes, in this case an airport. Then the IT system intended to serve that business process is described and analysed. Finally the integration of the system into the production environment is covered in detail. The book can be used in two ways: it can be read through as a thorough grounding in how UML really works in practice; in addition it can be used as stand alone guide to that particular aspect of your own project. Both result in an intuitive understanding of how to actually use UML.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

3.3 External View


3.3.1 What Benefit does a Business System Provide?

As a customer or business partner of an organization, you don't care if transactions within an organization take place manually or are IT-based. You are also not interested in how many forms employees of the organization have to fill out, whether it is 2 or 20. Customers and business partners are merely interested in what kind of goods and services can be offered, and how they can make use of them. The customer view describes the interactions with external parties, such as customers and partners, and presents the business system as a black box.

Note

Consider a business system, such as passenger services or an airport newsstand from the outside. Which output is of interest for customers and business partners? Is the output a service or material goods?

From the business administrative view, the goal of a business system is (profitable) output (also see Section 3.1.3, Business Systems). Output can generally be divided into goods...