Chapter 4: Business Process and Functional Modeling

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering terms, notations, and concepts from Chapter 4 on Use Cases and Activity Diagrams.

Use Case

A logical model that illustrates the activities performed by users of a system without specifying how those activities are implemented or discussing technology.

Actor

A person or external system that derives benefit from and is external to the subject, depicted as a stick figure or as a rectangle containing <> for nonhuman actors.

Subject Boundary

A rectangle representing the scope of the subject (such as a system or individual business process), labeled with the subject's name inside or on top.

Association Relationship

A relationship line in a use-case diagram that links an actor with the use case or use cases with which it interacts.

Include Relationship

A relationship representing the inclusion of one use case's functionality within another, drawn as a dashed arrow labeled <> pointing from the base use case to the used use case.

Extend Relationship

A relationship representing the extension of a use case to include optional behavior, drawn as a dashed arrow labeled <> pointing from the extension use case to the base use case.

Generalization Relationship

A relationship representing a specialized use case or actor linked to a more generalized one, denoted by a line with a hollow arrowhead pointing to the base/superclass.

Overview Use Case

A type of use case that provides a high-level overview of the requirements.

high‐level overview of the requirements.

Detail Use Case

A type of use case that contains all information needed to fully describe the interaction.

Essential Use Case

A type of use case describing only the minimum essential issues necessary to understand the business processes, independent of technology.

minimum essential issues necessary to understand

Real Use Case

A type of use case that goes further than essential requirements to describe a specific set of implementation steps.

Action

A simple, nondecomposable piece of behavior in an activity diagram that is labeled by its name.

Activity

A construct in an activity diagram used to represent a set of actions, labeled by its name.

Object Node

A node in an activity diagram representing an object connected to a set of object flows, labeled by its class name.

Control Flow

A solid arrow in an activity diagram showing the sequence of execution.

Object Flow

A dashed arrow in an activity diagram showing the flow of an object from one activity (or action) to another.

Initial Node

A solid circle in an activity diagram portraying the beginning of a set of actions or activities.

Final-Activity Node

A symbol consisting of a solid circle inside an outer ring, used to stop all control flows and object flows in an activity (or action).

Final-Flow Node

A circle containing an 'X' used in an activity diagram to stop a specific control flow or object flow.

Decision Node

A diamond symbol representing a test condition to ensure control or object flow goes down only one path, labeled with decision criteria.

Merge Node

A diamond symbol used to bring back together different decision paths created using a decision node.

Fork Node

A horizontal or vertical bar used to split behavior into a set of parallel or concurrent flows of activities (or actions).

Join Node

A horizontal or vertical bar used to bring back together a set of parallel or concurrent flows of activities (or actions).

Swimlane

A mechanism used to break up an activity diagram into rows and columns to assign individual activities or actions to responsible individuals or objects.