David Ross's Blog Random thoughts of a coder

My favourite design tools - part 2: Output to Input Diagrams

11. February 2014 10:59 by David in

An Output to Input diagram traces the outputs of a system back to its inputs. It is similar to navigating with a map where you start at your destination and work back towards your starting point. The notation uses circles to represent nouns and the arcs are used to represent either:

· “Composed of” relationships

o image

o Has

o Made from

o Combined with

· Or “Created by” relationships

o image

o ETL

o Events

Let’s assume we need a birthday cake for a party and since I’m not a good cook I decide to buy one. So we start by with our output Birthday Cake and work backwards. The Birthday Cake is composed of a normal Cake, a birthday greeting written in icing and some candles. I bought the cake using a Purchase Order which included a Birthday Greeting that I wanted written on the cake in icing.

image

Figure 1 Buy cake

If I was a little more adventurous I could bake a cake. So once again starting with the Birthday Cake it is composed of a Layered Cake and some Candles. The Layered Cake was made by layering Icing, Crème and Jam and Cake. The Cake was baked from a Mixture of Flour, Egg Whites, Sugar and Milk. Finally the Egg Whites were extracted from Eggs.

image

Figure 2 Making a birthday cake

As you can imagine we can keep extending the diagram further and further to the right we will see how the factories process raw materials from into flour, sugar and milk.

Benefits

1) Promotes the concept that there can be many different solutions to get to the same output

2) Discussion and analysis isn’t constrained by the starting position

· If you start at a cake shop you will never come up with a design to make the cake

· If you start with ingredients you might miss the opportunity to buy a fancier cake than can be made outside of a bakery

3) Naturally breaks a problem into a data or process flow

General Principles

1) All arcs into a node should be of the same relationship type

· Node is Composed of its children

· Node is Created by/from process

2) As you move towards the right the level of granularity should be getting finer

· If the output is a Car has wheels and wheels have bolts

3) A single node in the middle of the diagram that everything is channelled through is probably the wrong

· Might be too granular and should be broken up

· Node possibly is trying to model a process and thus should instead be an arc

Arc Attributes

Once the diagram has been created and we are happy that the model is complete you can start tagging the arcs with descriptive text.

How to use

The diagrams are typically used for requirements gathering process brainstorming sessions with business users. I usually start with the Cake example on the whiteboard and let the users come up with their own Nouns to use.

Phrases to elicit discussion:

1) Can be broken into…

2) Consists of…

3) Once approved is…

4) Waits until…

5) Is combined with…

Once the diagram has been created I go back over all of the arcs and determine:

· Are they a “Composed of” or “Created by” relationship?

· Can the step be automated or is it manual?

You can then start grouping Nouns and Arcs and determine:

· Should they be part of the same IT solution?

o Since you can keep going right until the start of the Universe it likely that a diagram will cross multiple applications or business processes

· What do they nodes map to?

o Systems

o Objects

o Data flow

o ETL

o An aggregate root

Comparison to Input to Output diagrams

Inputs to Output diagrams (Sequence, flow charts etc) can:

· Produce a poor result if the wrong starting point is chosen

· Promote the idea that every process only has a single “starting” point

· Be poor at capturing all of the transitions involved in a process or system

· Make processes that could be performed in parallel appear serial

Limitations

1) Poor choice for looping or iterating processes

2) Notation purposely doesn’t differentiate between entities that are in different states (i.e. light is on or off) to entirely different entities. That decision making process is considered low level design.

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