Course Description
Business Data Modeling explores business rules, policies and procedures and how they can be modeled effectively. Participants will learn entity relationship diagramming, super and sub-types, attributive and associative entities, and documenting data constraints. The logical data modeling approaches focus on the important requirements of the business that are discovered through significant user involvement during the analysis phase. You will also learn how to create models without being limited by technology or organizational structure.
The ability to communicate the intersection of business processes and information/data needs is key to the success of any software development project. Understanding and explaining user needs is a major challenge and opportunity for the business analyst. The business analyst who understands structured modeling has a distinct advantage in addressing and communicating requirements. And the use of models can greatly increase all stakeholders’ understanding of the relevancy of business rules and data management requirements to the project at hand.
Reminder: Prior to taking this course, you should have acquired the background as taught in How to Gather and Document User Requirements, Business Process Modeling and Developing Use Cases.
This course is aligned with version 2.0 of the Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK)™.
Learn
- Create logical data models to define business and project requirements
- Explain the purpose, importance, and uses of logical data modeling in the requirements gathering process
- Describe the elements of data flow diagrams and functional decomposition diagrams and their relationship to logical data models
- Explain a logical data model to stakeholders
- Apply logical data modeling to the overall software development life cycle and respond to business management issues
This course uses digital materials.
Agenda
* Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) and Functional Decomposition
Diagrams (FDDs)
o Developing DFDs and FDDs
o Identifying the business area
o Modeling essential business processes (FDDs)
o Documenting data use in business processes (DFDs)
o Understanding their relationship to logical data models
* Identifying and Describing the Conceptual Data Model
o Naming entities, attributes and relationships
o Discovering and defining entities
o Analyzing attributes
o Defining cardinality in relationships
o Understanding concatenated and surrogate unique identifiers
* The Logical Data Model
o Developing the detailed logical data model
o Identifying and applying entity types
o Modeling with subtypes and supertypes
o Understanding attributive and associative entities
o Understanding multivalued attributes
o Documenting the logical data model
o Analyzing data using the CRUD matrix
* Context-Level Data Flow Diagrams
o Developing diagrams that represent processes, external
agents and data flows
o Defining and naming diagram components
o Drawing divergent and convergent data flows
o Leveling the data flow diagram
o Avoiding common errors in diagramming
* The Transition to OO/UML
o Understanding the Unified Modeling Language (UML)
o Applying use case, class state and activity diagrams
* Other Key Topics
o Applying normalization rules
o Understanding the physical data model
o Describing the functions and benefits of CASE tools
o Verifying and presenting models to increase project success
Comments
Ace Recommendations
Undergraduate 2 credit hours
Course PDUs 21.0
Course CEUs 2.1
Course CDUs 21
BABOK V2.0 used in the CDU approval of this course