Some questions regarding Context and DataFlow Diagrams

Question

I have to develop a CRUD application, that will be coded in php.

I have 3 main actors (Users, Administrators and Doctors -- this is for an hypothetical hospital), each one with different Use Cases already defined.

Although I feel the Use Cases are more than enough to successfuly model the Class Diagram, I am being specifically asked to also include DataFlow Diagrams into the project's documentation.

I've been reading about DataFlow diagrams, and it seems you usually have first of all a Level 0 DataFlow Diagram, to which they call Context Diagram.

Being that this is basically a 3-tier application with 3 different Actors, how should I model the Context Diagram?

Being that a Context Diagram is supposed to just tell us what comes in and what comes out of our System, I can't imagine anything more interesting/descriptive than the following diagram:

Is this supposed to be something like this, or am I totally missing the point? This php page will connect to an Oracle database, but I guess that if the idea is to consider the System as a whole in the Context Diagram, I should "hide" that fact in the above diagram.

Where should I go on from here? I know I should "zoom" the System process to something more detailed. Maybe the next step would be to depict each one of the User Cases in a DataFlow diagram? Do I include repositories of data, already? For example, one for Users, other for Doctors and yet another for Administrators?

Thanks

Answer 1

Are you sure there's nothing else the system interacts with? e.g. diagnostics input, etc.?

If not then your context diag is basically ok - although I'd probably show each entity once and use double headed arrows. I'd agree with your reasoning for the db - it's part of the system, not external to it - so don't show it on the CD.

As for next steps, again you're on the right lines. Try modelling the flow for each Use Case as a DFD. DFDs are very useful for illustrating processing-intensive apps. Difficult to know if that's a good match to your problem or not.

You'll find DFDs are also useful for driving out and validating your Class Diagram. In fact, that's one of their strengths: datastores on the DFD should correlate with the contents of your class diagram (not necessarily one datastore to one class though). So do include datastores as you work through the processes. You'll find it drives out more than just the Actors.

hth.