Week 1

Question 1

What is a business function?

Answer 1

A business function:

• Refers to an activity that a company performs, like order management, marketing, selling, finances, product design, and so on.
• Business functions may be carried out by one or more departments and may be organized hierarchically.

Question 2

What is a business process?

Answer 2

The complete & coordinated set of collaborative activities that respond to a business requirement for action, that deliver value to customers (e.g., the purchasing of a certain product).

Question 3

What is business process integration?

Answer 3

Business process integration (BPI) is “the techniques and mechanisms for managing the movement of data, and the invocation of processes in the correct and proper order to support the management and execution of common processes that exist in and between applications”.

Question 4

What are collaborative processes and collaborative activities?

Answer 4

• A Collaborative Process spans multiple enterprises and creates value for them.
• A Collaborative Process = a process with implicit behavior and interaction between multiple business entities with different roles.
• Collaborative Activities = actions performed by the participating entities in response to the messages they receive from other participating entities.
• Collaborative Activities are typically implemented by private business process activities.

Question 5

Use cases: What is a scenario and describe use case?

Answer 5

A scenario is a sequence of steps describing an interaction between a user and a system.

A use case is a set of scenarios tied together by a common user goal.

Question 6

What is a class diagram?

Answer 6

•A class diagram describes the types of objects in the system and the various kinds of static relationships that exist among them.

Question 7

Explain attributes

Answer 7

• Attributes are the set of properties shared by objects of this class.
• Each attribute should have a type, e.g. String, Integer, Boolean, user-defined type.
• You can also specify that an attribute is optional
• You can set a default value

Question 8

Explain operations (in classes)

Answer 8

• Operations are processes/activities that a class knows to carry out
• An operation can have zero or more parameters.
• Each parameter has a type.
• And each operation can return zero or one value, which is also typed

Question 9

Explain relationships:

1. associations
2. aggregation/composition
3. generalization

Answer 9

• Relationships between classes
• Associations: somehow related
• Aggregation/Composition: made-of, whole to parts (latter is exclusive)
• Generalization: is-kind-of related

Question 10

Explain associations relationship

Answer 10

Question 11

Explain Generalization relationship

Answer 11

Question 12

Explain Aggregation relationship

Answer 12

Question 13

Explain Composition relationship

Answer 13

Question 14

Explain sequence diagram

Answer 14

• Sequence diagrams are used to model the interactions among objects in use cases.
• They demonstrate how objects collaborate for the behavior.
• Set of messages between objects in time sequence (scenario) for (a) use case(s)
• Lifelines of objects (vertically)
• Messages/Calls between objects (horizontally)
• Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Messaging

Question 15

Explain activity diagram

Answer 15

• Activity diagram is often used
• to describe complex behavior of a system
• to analyze a (group of) use case
• to explain complicated sequential algorithms, including parallel processes
• In shorts:

The activity diagram shows who does what under which condition and in which sequence.