Systems are most efficiently built and successfully deployed when the architectural specification is clear and all stakeholders agree upon the design early in the project lifecycle.
Requirements can come from many sources, but the system’s analysts and architects must consolidate these into requirements documentation and manage these requirements. From the requirements, your team can draw system use cases and high-level system behavior.
Sites that use Rational RequisitePro® can use the Requirements Management perspective to map existing requirements definitions to existing UML model elements, such as use cases. You can also create requirements from existing model elements, or create model elements from existing requirements definitions.
The software architect creates a use case model to define system use cases and behavior, and actors on the system, as well as to specify user workflows.
Business analysts and architects describe the system domain by defining a high-level functional model of the system. The analysis phase identifies the data that will be stored in the system and how it will be processed.
The architect creates an analysis model to describe a logical view of the functional requirements. This model defines high-level objects in the system and their interactions.
The architect, in conjunction with the software development team, designs the system architecture at a detailed level.
During detailed design, the development team takes the high-level model that was created during analysis activities and creates the design model. The developers add details to the model to describe the implementation of the system, such as programming constructs and technologies that are used for persistence, security, logging, and deployment.
The design model can be further refined by applying proven design patterns and automated model-to-model transformations.
While requirements gathering, modeling, and implementation are iterated across different phases of the project lifecyle, several workflows are supported continuously throughout the project.
Parent topic: Product overview