Chapter 3 Building Process Hierarchy Diagrams

Building Process Hierarchies

A process hierarchy comprises a set of processes and the decomposition links that connect them.

At each level of decomposition, processes can represent different types of functions. In the following example, the Marketing process is a department, the Corporate Web Site is a project, and the Analyze needs process is an activity:

If you are working with the Data Flow Diagram process language, you can analyze each process at the first level of your hierarchy in its own context diagram to show the primary relationships between the organization and the external entities with which it deals (see the Working with the Data Flow Diagram chapter).