Process-Oriented Requirement Analysis Supporting the Data Warehouse Design Process - A Use Case Driven Approach

Intelligent and comprehensive analysis systems are a powerful instrument for companies to analyse their business. The implementation of such analysis systems for an enterprise-wide management and decision support can be very different from traditional software implementations. Because analysis systems are strongly data-driven, the development process is highly dependent on its underlying data, which is generally stored in a data warehouse. Data warehouse systems generally concern many organisational units. Therefore, the collection of unambiguous, complete, verifiable, consistent and usable requirements can be a very difficult task. Use cases are considered as standard notation for object-oriented requirement modelling. We illustrate how use cases enhances communication between domain experts, data warehouse specialists, data warehouse designers and other professionals with different backgrounds. This paper explains how use cases can be used to elicit requirements for data warehouse systems, and how to involve the organisational context in the modelling process. With an adapted object model, we demonstrate how to capture different analysis perspectives of the business process. We develop a predefined set of dimension objects that belong to every classic business process and are able to create various fact objects, representing these perspectives.