ANSWER

A view organizes diagrams into logical groups to describe a particular aspect of the system.  It is the abstraction of the system organized is such a way as to give a perspective of a related set of concerns.

The purpose of using views as a business analyst is to enable the analyst to comprehend very complex systems, and to organize the problem or solution domain around specific areas of expertise.  The audience interested in each view may vary based on their roles and experience.  A subject matter expert from the business will ask different questions and have different concerns than a developer or system architect.  Views help present the information in an easily digestible manner.

The different views that a business process or system should be broken into varies and is the decision of the analyst and the stakeholders involved in the project.

Some common views used by analysts are:

• The Behavioral View – A view showing the functionality of the system as perceived by external users.
• The Logical View – A view showing how the functionality of the system is designed in terms of the logical static structure and dynamic behavior.
• The Implementation View – A view describing how the physical code is structured, its main modules, and their dependencies.
• Deployment View – A view showing the physical deployment of the system such as computers, servers, switches, routers, etc.
• Organization View – A view depicting organizational elements, their structure, and their relationships.  This may include people (an org chart), agreements, contracts, policies and organizational interactions.
• Requirements view – A view describing the requirements, goals, and objectives that the system shall support.

Not all of these views would necessarily be used together.  They belong to multiple standardized view models.

Some standard view models or frameworks exist which dictate how systems should be organized into standards views.   Some examples are:

• 4 + 1 View Model
• Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF)
• Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP)
• Zachman Framework