Relationship analysis: Formalizing relationships within the systems analysis process

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2-2016

Abstract

A significant aspect of the systems analysis process involves discovering and representing entities and their inter-relationships. This article presents relationship analysis (RA), a systematic, domain-independent systems analysis technique to determine a domain’s relationship structure. The quality of design artifacts, such as class diagrams, can be improved by first representing the complete relationship structure of the problem domain. A rigorous evaluation was conducted, including a formal experiment comparing novice and experienced analysts with and without the use of RA. In addition, professional software industry engineers were interviewed and educated about RA. It was shown that the RA process provides a fuller and richer systems analysis, resulting in improved quality of class diagrams. It was also shown that RA enables analysts of varying experience levels to achieve class diagrams of similar quality.

Identifier

85057016643 (Scopus)

Publication Title

Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1080/15228053.2016.1198623

e-ISSN

23336897

ISSN

15228053

First Page

93

Last Page

119

Issue

2

Volume

18

Grant

DUE-0226075

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

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