Creating UML Diagram for E-bay - Coursework Example

Creating UML diagram for e-bay.co.uk Introduction : The present day scenario in the field of business process modeling is highly challenging. This article focuses on analyzing and creating new designs for the existing e-bay.co.uk online marketplace. The UK site alone has been considered as a business organization and efforts have been made to model it with UML ( Unified Modeling Language) models and Business Process Modeling Notation ( BPMN ) including data flow diagrams and others. Initially the e-bay.co.uk marketplace has been explained with it’s central process goal. Later a subset of it’s operations are considered for modeling. Before modeling the processes a brief discussion about the modeling tools and notations has been done to emphasis the necessity for such models for business processes. The next section of the paper shows the various model diagrams of the chosen e-bay.co.uk online company. These models have been developed with Enterprise Architect version 7.1 UML case tool of the Sparx Systems. The e-Bay.co.uk online marketplace : The eBay is a global online market with a customer strength of around 230 million. It was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995. His intention was to have a central place to buy and sell all kinds of products. The UK market was launched in 1999 and at present it has around 14 million users. The eBay UK market has a product listing of nearly 10 million items under 13,000 categories. The market supports millions of small business retailers. The growth rate of eBay UK market place is very strong with revenue of around $ 100 million says the official website of eBay ( 2008 ). The range of items sold on eBay vary from antiques, art, books, cars, coins, computing items, consumer electronics, dolls, health and beauty items, mobiles, pottery, sports goods, toys, stamps and many more. The market mechanism involves registration ( user registration) with the company as a user. The user can be a buyer or seller. A seller has to register again ( seller registration ), for posting his product in the product list of the website. A seller can browse the existing product listing and prepare his own product details. The seller has to add his product to the product listing along with the pricing quote. The eBay organization has control over the product listing, hence the seller has to post his item with the consent of the organization. The seller has to wait for any buyer to request or bid on his product. Generally any buyer browses through the product listing and chooses the items of interest and adds it to his shopping cart. He then places a bid on a particular product or he just sends a request to buy it for fixed price. The online market allows exchange of messages between the buyer and seller. Finally the company identifies the winning buyer based on the bid value and notifies the seller about the winning buyer. The seller then needs to prepare an invoice and e-mail it to the buyer. The buyer after receiving the invoice sends the payment through PayPal which is the method of money transfer over eBay. This PayPal system has been acquired by eBay for safe and fast transfer of money between buyers and sellers. After receiving the money the seller has to dispatch the product to the buyer. The eBay.co.uk company has many sophisticated mechanisms to protect the seller’s owner rights and the money transaction. According to the eBay website they have a specific programme called Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) Programme for the owners of products to report to the company about the listings that infringe their rights like trademark, patent or copyright. Also the company encourages to register as rights owner and become members of the VeRO programme, so that they may acquire the help of many third party web monitoring and reporting agents who help in protecting the intellectual property rights. Another important feature of the eBay .co.uk is the facility of PayPal for safe and fast exchange of money. Thus the eBay.co.uk company has many internal and external operations with many business actors and internal workers. The analysis and modeling of such a company demands sophisticated tools. A brief discussion about these tools follows. Unified Modeling Language ( UML) : The UML emerged in 1990s with an intention to have a coherent set of elements to model a business process and has become the industry standard for software modeling and design of processes in the scientific and business worlds. The system’s structure and design can be described with a set of standard diagrams. Also the tool enables the visual map a systems behavior. These types of tools are intended towards object oriented programming. UML has a vast set of graphical notation for classes, nodes, work flows, use cases, objects, activities, etc. Thus UML tools help in modeling a wide scope of managing large, complex systems. It enables the development of software-independent models of the business process that has to be automated. It also gives a better understanding of the existing risks and priorities before choosing the technology for implementation. There are many UML tools available, in this paper the Enterprise Architect version 7.1 of Sparx Systems has been used to develop the various models of the chosen eBay.co.uk. company. The Business Process Modeling Notation ( BPMN ) : A business process is a set of actions implemented to produce a particular output for a market. The actions are carried out in a specific sequence with respect to time or place. The elements defined in a business process model are inputs, goal, resources, events, outputs says Sparks.G ( 2000 ) . The goal of BPMN is to give a standard notation which can be understood by stakeholders. These stakeholders analyse, create and improve the processes. The BPMN also bridges the gap between process design and actual implementation. The BPMN model for the eBay.co.uk is shown in the following figure.1. with pools and swimlanes. Fig.1. the BPMN model for the e-Bay company. The Data Flow Diagram : The data flow diagram gives a graphical representation of the flow of data in a structured system. Initially a context diagram can be drawn to show the interaction between system and the outside actors. Then this can be elaborated to a DFD showing the full details of the system being modeling. Fig.2. shows the data flow diagram for the eBay.co.uk . it shows the interactions of sellers with the eBay, buyer with the eBay and also the interaction between the seller and buyer. Fig.2. the Data Flow diagram of the eBay marketplace. The Use Case models of the ebay.co.uk : The business use case model describes the process, sequence of actions, the interactions between business actors and the system. Jim Hieumann (2003) says that the business actors could be potential customers, suppliers or partners. The use case diagram gives the functional requirements of the system, the method of interaction and the system response to outside actors. The use case diagram for seller activity in the eBay.co.uk company is shown in fig.3. Fig.3. Business Use case model of seller activity in eBay. The above model has been created with business actors and business use cases of the business use case tools available in Enterprise Architect. The use case diagram for buyer activity shown in fig.4. has been created with simple use case tools of the Enterprise Architect. Fig.4. Use case model depicting buyer activity in the eBay.co.uk. The Sequence Diagrams : The sequence diagram is again a graphical representation of the series of activities in a lifeline. It is one of the four Interaction diagrams. The sequence diagram gives a structured representation of the system’s behavior. It shows the work flow and the message flow over time. The basic elements of the sequence diagram tools are lifeline, boundary, control, entity, gate, etc. The sequence diagram for selling process is shown in fig.5. and that of the buying process is shown in fig.6. respectively. Fig.5. Sequence diagram of seller activity in eBay. Fig.6. Sequence diagram of buyer activity in eBay.co.uk. The Object Diagram : An object diagram is a type of communication diagram showing the connections between objects which are instances of the classes defined in the system. While the use case model tells what the process does, the object model tells how the process will be done says Jim Heumann ( 2003 ) . The elements of an object diagram are actors, objects, entity, boundary, control, etc. Fig. 7. Shows the object diagram of eBay.co.uk. Fig.7. Object diagram of eBay.co.uk The Eriksson – Penker Extension model : The Eriksson – Penker business extension diagram is a kind of analysis diagram which can capture high level process and primitive models of system behavior. It is an informal diagram but gives a good representation of the essential characteristics. Some of the specific elements of this model are process, object, send, receive, entity, decision, etc. Fig.8. shows the possible Eriksson – Penker Extension model of the eBay.co.uk created with Enterprise Architect. Fig.8. Eriksson – Penker Extension model of eBay. The Activity diagram with Swimlanes : Activity diagrams give the system’s behavior and the relation of this to the overall flow of the system. It is similar to a flow chart which depicts the logical path of the process depending on different conditions and concurrent processes. Outside interruptions, data availability are also considered while deriving the activity diagram. The specific elements of activity toolbox are partition, synchronization, object, structured activity, action, decision, merge, etc. Fig.9. shows the overall activity diagram of the buying and selling processes with the swimlanes in the eBay.co.uk marketplace. Fig.9. Activity diagram of the eBay.co.uk selling and buying processes. Conclusion : The above article discusses the modeling of business processes using UML tools. The business organization chosen for modeling is the eBay.co.uk global marketplace. The buying and selling processes of this company has been modeled with the Enterprise Architect version 7.1 UML tool. Different models have been created to identify the process goals, business actors and internal workers for the chosen selling and buying processes. The above models show the robustness of UML tools in business process modeling. References : 1. eBay – The World’s Online Marketplace 1995 – 2008. eBay UK Facts and Figures http://pages.ebay.co.uk/aboutebay/thecompany/companyoverview.html 2. Jim Heumann, 18 Nov. 2003 , Introduction to Business Modeling using the Unified Modeling Language , Requirements management evangelist, IBM. 3. Geoffery Sparks, 2000, An introduction to modeling software systems using the Unified Modeling Language - The Business Process Model , Enterprise Architect,UML Case Tool by Sparx Systems. http://www.sparxsystems.com.au Read More