Functional software architecture: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:03, 12 April 2007

Revision as of 18:53, 21 April 2007

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===Integrated DEFinition===

[[IDEF]] is a [[structured modeling]] technique, which was first developed for the modeling of manufacturing systems. It was already being used by the U.S. Airforce in 1981. Initially it had 4 different notations to model an enterprise from a certain viewpoint. These were IDEF0, IDEF1, IDEF2 and IDEF3 for functional, data, dynamic and process analysis respectively. In the past decades a number of tools and techniques for the integration of the notations are developed in an incremental way. However, recent interesting attempts by Kim et. al. (2002) show it can be done; skip the IDEF2 notation and use an extended version of the IDEF1 (IDEF1x) enables the creation of an integrated IDEF/UML framework for the development of IT systems within the organization.

IDEF clearly shows how a business process flows through a variety of decomposed business functions with corresponding information inputs, outputs and actors. Like CIMOSA, it also uses different enterprise views. Moreover, IDEF can be easily transformed into UML-diagrams for the further development of IT systems. These positive characteristics make it a powerful method for the development of Functional Software Architectures.