ba35:ba35

Logical Data Modeling

3 Days – Course No. BA35

Prerequisites:

Prior to taking this course, you should have acquired the background as taught in How to Gather and Document User Requirements (BA20).

Learn How to:

◦ Create logical data models to define business and project requirements

◦ Explain the purpose, importance, and uses of logical data modeling in the requirements gathering process

◦ Describe the elements of data flow diagrams and its relationship to logical data models

◦ Explain a logical data model to stakeholders

◦ Apply logical data modeling to the overall software development life cycle and respond to business management issues

course Synopsis:

The ability to communicate the intersection of business processes and information/data needs is critical to the success of any software development project. Understanding and explaining user needs is a major challenge and opportunity for the business analyst. The business analyst who understands structured modeling has a distinct advantage in addressing and communicating requirements. And the use of models can greatly increase all stakeholders’ understanding of the relevancy of business rules and data management requirements to the project at hand.

Logical Data Modeling explores business rules, policies and procedures and how they can be modeled effectively. Participants will learn entity relationship diagramming, super and sub-types, attributive and associative entities, and documenting data constraints. The logical data modeling approaches focus on the important requirements of the business that are discovered through significant user involvement during the analysis phase. You will also learn how to create models without being limited by technology or organizational structure.

You’ll leave this course ready to communicate business and project requirements to project stakeholders using conceptual and logical data models. In short, you’ll be able to integrate multiple business units so that you understand the big picture of your organization

course TOPICS:

Background of Modeling

◦ What is a model?

◦ Context for modeling

◦ Modeling the business area

◦ Types of Models and the Business Requirements Document (BRD)

Identifying and Describing the Conceptual Data Model

◦ Naming entities, attributes and relationships

◦ Discovering and defining entities

◦ Analyzing attributes

◦ Defining cardinality in relationships

◦ Understanding concatenated and surrogate unique identifiers

The Logical Data Model

◦ Developing the detailed logical data model

◦ Identifying and applying entity types

◦ Modeling with subtypes and supertypes

◦ Understanding attributive and associative entities

◦ Understanding multivalued attributes

◦ Documenting the logical data model by describing data constraints

◦ Analyzing data using the CRUD matrix

Overview of Context-Level Data Flow Diagrams

◦ Developing diagrams that represent processes, external agents and data flows

◦ Defining and naming diagram components

◦ Drawing divergent and convergent data flows

◦ Leveling the data flow diagram

◦ Avoiding common errors in diagramming

The Transition to OO/UML

◦ Understanding the Unified Modeling Language (UML)

◦ Applying use case, class, state and activity diagrams