Innovator for Business Analysts is the integrated tool for business analysts, requirements analysts, process modelers and IT architects for analyzing and tracking requirements; it can also be used for modeling use cases and business processes.
Business analysts use an array of various tools nowadays for completing their tasks. These range from Office applications and requirements, right the way through to business process and UML modeling tools.
Innovator for Business Analysts is a tool which enables both business process modeling in BPMN and requirements modeling in UML, which then makes it possible to integrate textual requirements.
Innovator’s modern Office application with ribbon makes for easy usability.
The most important component of Innovator for Business Analysts is an editor for process modeling. The new BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation), which was presented as Beta 1 in August 2009, is supported. The new BPMN is the standard for business process modeling and was expanded in version 2.0 to enable modeling of processes right up to the mapping of an SOA.
BPMN is used in Innovator for Business Analysts in an attempt to make the editor as smart as possible so that it is easier to get started using BPMN.e.g. Innovator specifies the precise BPMN event type from the context as much as possible itself so that the modeler doesn’t have to.
Innovator for Business Analystscan be used for obtaining textual requirements; Innovator for Requirements can be used for synchronizing Microsoft Word documents.These requirements can be linked to all diagrams in Innovator for Business Analysts. This enables the user to e.g. import a business rule from a Word document as text and link it to the right section in the business process as a requirement.
Mask flows often play an important role in requirements analysis. This is because users of an IT application in the operating department primarily use masks, dialogs or windows for communicating their requirements.Innovator for Business Analystsprovides a special mask flow notation which was developed based on BPMN. This means that mask flows fit seamlessly with other processes.
UML’s use case models are another popular way of modeling requirements.There are a multitude of link options with BPMN models in Innovator for Business Analysts.
A BPMN collaboration can be used separately to describe the interaction of those involved in the use case. Actors and systems of the use case become participants in the BPMN collaboration.
And last but by no means least, an option that many modelers have felt was missing in the past: Scenarios for a use case can be defined as a path through a BPMN process. This means that various paths through the same business process can define scenarios for use cases; these can then be linked as scenarios with the use cases and maintained in the tool.
With the structure diagram, Innovator for Business Analysts gives you the option of modeling the structure of your business objects in a clear and simple way. An object structure contains entries which can be typed - either with another structure which is nested or with a class or data type. You can visualize how the object structure is nested in the structure diagram.
Many projects use UML class diagrams for creating business object models, domain models or analysis models.Complete UML 2 class diagrams are now integrated in Innovator for Business Analysts so that a user doesn’t need to swap to a UML tool when they need these types of models. You can link object structures with the class model and, in doing so, model how structures and the class model are linked.
If you systematically use data models rather than class models for analyzing structure relationships, you can link your object structures using entities rather than UML classes.
Modeling tools are specialized in such a way that they can only display individual diagram types in one editor. Whiteboards, on the other hand, have the ability to display a variety of different diagrams; lines and arrows can then be used to clearly show how the models are connected to each other. The user often has to copy parts of the diagram into Microsoft Powerpoint or Word to communicate information, as modeling tools cannot normally be displayed in such a way.
With this new whiteboard option, otherwise known as an overview diagram, Innovator for Business Analysts enables precisely this model-to-model link to be visualized. A user can simply drag diagrams out of the model tree, drop them into the diagram and then model links between the models. The diagrams are always up-to-date. This means that even a team working from two different locations holding a telephone conference can modify a class diagram in one location and the business analyst at the other location can see the modification made in their overview diagram in real-time, thanks to the Innovator server.
Innovator for Business Analystsenables mapping of business models to UML models in software development with Innovator for Software Architects, and to conceptual data models inInnovator for Database Architects. It is important that it is a real mapping, i.e. if the business models are modified in the Innovator server, possible effects on the software development and databases can be analyzed straight away.
Innovator for Business Analysts also has the option of exporting BPEL for workflow engines. All export formats are created using templates; these can then be customized by the user. This enables details of special BPEL engines to be supported.
Innovator for Business Analysts supports both BPEL and the BPMN 2.0’s BPMN XML format, WSDL for service definition and other XML formats.
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