Functionality Analysis

What

A description of the functionality in the blocks.

How

The dish

A description of the functionality of each block.

Ingredients

• Artefacts from the General Analysis up to this point

Process

Walk through each block in the overall architecture diagram and describe the functionality of each block. Do not think about how the required functionality can be implemented at this point.

All artefacts produced up to this point in time are sources of information for the functionality descriptions.

The customer may possess valuable information that is to be gathered and formalised, e.g. the customer may have knowledge of necessary mathematics or algorithms. Therefore, a high customer involvement is still recommended during this process; the customer is the best source of information in terms of data manipulation in the system-to-be.

Estimate the complexity of each functionality. Use, for example, the categories: Simple, Medium, Complex and Very Complex. Functionality with a high complexity should be described in more details.

If specific mathematics is needed for the functionality, include the necessary formulas, if available, together with the description.

Why

It is vital to have an overall description of the system-to-be, and when the analysis breaks down the system into smaller blocks, the functionality of each block must likewise be described.

Each time a whole is broken into smaller blocks, the details needed to describe the individual block function become finer and finer. The developer gains more and more understanding of how the system-to-be shall be implemented.

Example