Relationship analysis: Formalizing relationships within the systems analysis process

A significant aspect of the systems analysis process involves discovering and representing entities and their inter-relationships. This article presents relationship analysis (RA), a systematic, domain-independent systems analysis technique to determine a domain’s relationship structure. The quality of design artifacts, such as class diagrams, can be improved by first representing the complete relationship structure of the problem domain. A rigorous evaluation was conducted, including a formal experiment comparing novice and experienced analysts with and without the use of RA. In addition, professional software industry engineers were interviewed and educated about RA. It was shown that the RA process provides a fuller and richer systems analysis, resulting in improved quality of class diagrams. It was also shown that RA enables analysts of varying experience levels to achieve class diagrams of similar quality.