Explain the importance of leveling and balancing.Your boss, the IT director, wants you to explain FDDs, BPM, DFDs, and UML to a group of companymanagers and users who will serve on a systems development team for the new marketing system.

Question

What will be an ideal response?What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

When lower-level diagrams, also called child diagrams, are needed to show detail, it is essential that they be leveled and balanced. Leveling is the process of drawing a series of increasingly detailed diagrams, until the desired degree of detail is reached. Balancing maintains consistency among the entire series of diagrams, including input and output data flows, data definition, and process descriptions.
Leveling displays the information system as a single process and then shows more detail until all processes are functional primitives. At that point, analysts describe the set of DFDs as leveled. Leveling also is called exploding, partitioning, or decomposing. Because analysts create DFDs as a series of top-down pictures of an information system, each lower level provides additional details.
DFDs must be balanced properly. A balanced set of DFDs preserves the input and output data flows of the parent on the child DFD. Figure 5-16 on page 158 shows a balanced DFD; it has the same input and output flows as its parent, which is process 1, FILL ORDER.