Logical Data Modelling

Communicate business & project requirements to project stakeholders using conceptual & logical data models.

Course Overview

As a business analyst – your ability to communicate business processes and information needs is central to the success of any software development project. The business analyst who can use structured modelling to address and communicate requirements - has a distinct advantage. This is because the use of models can greatly increase all stakeholders’ understanding of a project’s business rules and data management requirements. Logical Data Modelling explores business rules, policies and procedures and how they can be modelled effectively without being limited by technology or organisational structure. Participants will learn entity relationship diagramming, super and sub-types, attributive and associative entities, and documenting data constraints.

Course Topics

Click an individual topic title to expand/contract it or
Expand All Topics | Contract All Topics

1. Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs) and Functional Decomposition Diagrams (FDDs)
   1. Developing DFDs and FDDs
   2. Identifying the business area
   3. Modelling essential business processes (FDDs)
   4. Documenting data use in business processes (DFDs)
   5. Understanding their relationship to logical data models
2. Identifying and Describing the Conceptual Data Model
   1. Naming entities, attributes and relationships
   2. Discovering and defining entities
   3. Analysing attributes
   4. Defining cardinality in relationships
   5. Understanding concatenated and surrogate unique identifiers
3. The Logical Data Model
   1. Developing the detailed logical data model
   2. Identifying and applying entity types
   3. Modelling with subtypes and supertypes
   4. Understanding attributive and associative entities
   5. Understanding multivalued attributes
   6. Documenting the logical data model
   7. Analysing data using the CRUD matrix
4. Context-Level Data Flow Diagrams
   1. Developing diagrams that represent processes, external agents and data flows
   2. Defining and naming diagram components
   3. Drawing divergent and convergent data flows
   4. Levelling the data flow diagram
   5. Avoiding common errors in diagramming
5. The Transition to OO/UML
   1. Understanding the Unified Modelling Language (UML)
   2. Applying use case, class state and activity diagrams
6. Other Key Topics
   1. Applying normalisation rules
   2. Understanding the physical data model
   3. Describing the functions and benefits of CASE tools
   4. Verifying and presenting models to increase project success