During design and analytical works, the necessity to calculate the parameters of a business process or to estimate the complexity of the built software arises repeatedly. Most formal methods often require quite difficult calculations. On the other hand, during analytical or design works an activity diagram is usually created, which presents, in a natural way, the components of the business process or the elements of use case scenario. In this article, I will attempt to present how to calculate selected parameters of the business process using activity diagrams modeled in Enterprise Architect and additional tool (Tormigo).

The fundamental reason why the described feature is present in Tormigo (the module is called Tormigo Analytics) is the need for knowledge about the parameters of given business process. When describing the business process using the activity diagram, we wanted to know how much the service delivery will cost and how long it will take. In case of unforked business processes it is easy to calculate it, whilst in case of more complex diagrams it was tedious and prone to errors made by the person calculating these parameters.

TORMIGO’s capacity in the scope of calculating business process parameters pre-defined by an analyst will be presented on an example of pizza ordering process (Fig. 1).

In this case, the use of TORMIGO Analytics will be aimed at help in answering the question how the change of the business process will affect the order processing time. The change relates to the requirement that the employees of the customer service department should propose additional pizza toppings. The change in the ordering process has been marked red in the diagram below (Fig. 2)

After creation of diagrams, the next step is to describe the parameters based on Tagged Values. These parameters may be defined in Tormigo in Analysis → Definition of TAP Tag (Fig. 3)

Next, clicking Add button allows one to add a parameter. In our example it will be the maximum time (TIME_MAX). Tormigo added an appropriate column automatically (Fig.).

Using filters that can be found to the right (Fig.) allows one to find more quickly the activities that we want to describe

It is important that the values of the parameters may be described in Tormigo not only in the place indicated above, but also by selecting from menu Analysis → Activities, Tagged Values tab (Fig. 6)

or in Enterprise Architect in the properties of the activity in Tagged Values tab (Fig. 7)

After defining the parameters, it is time to see the analysis results. In order to prepare the report, one should select from Analysis menu -> Analysis of TAP for activity diagrams. Next, from the drop-down list one should select the diagram that will be analyzed and confirm the selection with Select button (Fig.

In Summary tab one can view the list of activities that compose the process. Report description tab allows one to define additional parameters such as the title of the report, data of the person preparing the report, date of preparing it and a version (default date format is YYYYMMDD). By clicking Generate report button, the report preview is generated. Sample reports are defined in Figures 9 and 10.

Those reports indicate the time expressed in seconds, but this type of variable values serves only as an example. It may be currency, number of parts, mass or any other unit of measurement as well.

It is time to mention limitations: Activities marked with an asterisk mean looped actions. When Tormigo Analytics finds the occurrence of a loop, it will repeat it only once.

Tormigo Analytics is limited by its functionality to activity diagrams, since it does not analyze the types of gates but only traces the sequence of the activity determined by connections.

Summing up, Tormigo Analytics is a very good tool for estimating the changes resulting from the modification of the business process. Calculation of the sum of values of particular parameters is one of the simplest forms of estimation. In many cases, this method may prove to be sufficient to demonstrate gains or losses resulting from the implementation of modeled changes.

To change the language of TORMIGO please select from the menu:
File (Plik) –> Application configuration (Konfiguracja aplikacji )

or

In point of application language (język aplikacji) to select the appropriate language (Polish or English)

or

If you define requirements in Enterprise Architect and you like to work under Linux, use Tormigo. Tormigo works under Windows and Linux platforms. Tormigo does not allow for modeling, but you can:

• load requirements directly from OpenOffice
• create the content of new requirement or modify the existing one
• create use cases
• save use cases scenarios
• assign requirements to use cases
• create many advanced reports

Check out our 30 days free TORMIGO version. Free download.

Tormigo also enables direct introduction of requirements into Enterprise Architect.

When managing requirements, often the problem is the versioning and tracing changes in requirements. This problem is also present in Enterprise Architect. Tormigo – an application I thought up – helps manage this procedure. It not only versioning automatically, but also stores copies of the previous versions. Below, please find a clip presenting this functionality.

If the screen is too small, click your right mouse button on the clip and select Toggle Fullscreen. You may also select the clip-resizing button on the right side in the bottom.

Aside from acquisition of requirements, Tormigo additionally allows efficient mapping of requirements for use cases. The advantage of this application is that it helps automatically make traceabilty between requirements and use cases or another requirement.

Below, please find a clip presenting this functionality.

The most important feature of Tormigo is the possibility of acquiring requirements directly from a text document. Open Office has been chosen as a text document as it opens popular file formats, including doc and docx. In addition, Open Office operates in Linux.

The acquired requirements are entered directly into the Enterprise Architect’s repository.

I am pleased to announce that our CASE STUDY concerning our cooperation with PIAP was published on the websites of Sparx Systems community. A link to the Case Study: http://community.sparxsystems.com/casestudies/engineering/architecture-and-interfaces-management-proteus-system-case-study.

Apart from Enterprise Architect, we also used our Tormigo application during the project.