Guideline: Finding Business Workers and Entities
Tips for locating business workers and business entities.
Relationships
Related Elements
Main Description

To find business workers, ask the following questions and record the insights and answers:

  • Who interfaces directly with actors?
  • Who controls the flow of the process?

To find business entities, as the following questions and record the insights and answers:

  • Who's the first worker we need some responsibility from?
  • Who's the next worker we need responsibility from?
  • What information do we need to give/get to business entities?
  • What information in the organization needs to be created, updated, deleted, or transformed?

Business entities can also be found by identifying the key abstractions of the business. These are the obvious "things" or elements the business uses, produces, or manipulates.

Use Noun Filtering with the business use cases or business requirements. Identify the nouns in a scenario or requirement, remove redundant or trivial nouns, and consider if the remaining nouns are elements that the business needs.

Attributes can be inappropriately identified as an entity. An attribute is a characteristic of an entity rather than something that stands alone by itself. An entity called Audit Report might have an attribute called Title, but it would not be appropriate to consider the title as a separately controlled entity. On the other hand, an Audit Report might be associated with an Auditor and an Audit Log, but these are a business worker and a separately created and controlled entity respectively, not attributes contained within the Audit Report.

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