The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Relationship analysis : improving the systems analysis process
Author:	Catanio, Joseph Thomas
View Online:	njit-etd2004-078 (xviii, 288 pages ~ 12.9 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Information Systems
Degree:	Doctor of Philosophy
Program:	Information Systems
Document Type:	Dissertation
Advisory Committee:	Bieber, Michael (Committee chair) Cheng, Jane (Committee member) Deek, Fadi P. (Committee member) Im, Il (Committee member) Kirova, Vassilka D. (Committee member) Paul, Ravi (Committee member)
Date:	2004-05
Keywords:	Relationship Analysis Systems Entity Taxonomy Creativity
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	A significant aspect of systems analysis involves discovering and representing entities and their inter-relationships. Guidelines exist to identify entities but do not provide a rigorous and comprehensive process to explicitly capture the relationship structure of the problem domain. Whereas, other analysis techniques lightly address the relationship discovery process, Relationship Analysis is the only systematic, domain-independent analysis technique focusing exclusively on a domain's relationship structure. The quality of design artifacts, such as class diagrams, and development time necessary to generate these artifacts can be improved by first representing the complete relationship structure of the problem domain. The Relationship Analysis Model is the first theory-based taxonomy to classify relationships. A rigorous evaluation was conducted, including a formal experiment comparing novice and experienced analysts with and without Relationship Analysis. It was shown that the Relationship Analysis Process based on the model does provide a fuller and richer systems analysis, resulting in improved quality of and reduced time in generating class diagrams. It also was shown that Relationship Analysis enables analysts of varying experience levels to achieve a similar level of quality of class diagrams. Relationship Analysis significantly enhances the systems analyst's effectiveness, especially in the area of relationship discovery and documentation resulting in improved analysis and design artifacts.