System and Context Boundaries

5 important questions on System and Context Boundaries

What is the System Boundary?

The system boundary seperates the system to be developed from its environment; i.e., it seperates the part of the reality that can be modified or altered by the development process from aspects that cannot be changed or modified by the development process.

What is the Context Boundary?

The context boundary seperates the relevant part of the environment of a system to be developed from the irrelevant part, i.e., the part that does not influence the system to be developed and, thus, does not have to be considered during requirements engineering

What is a grey zone?

Frequently, the system boundary is not defined precisely until the end of the requirements engineering process: the initial vague seperation area is called the Grey Zone.
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What are the context aspects that initiated/ influenced the definition of the requirements?

  1. People (stakeholder or groups of stakeholders)
  2. Systems in operation (technical systems, software and hardware)
  3. Processes (technical or physical processes, business processes)
  4. Events (technical or physical)
  5. Documents (e.g. laws, standards, system documentation)

How to document the system context?

The system context may be documented using:
  1. Use Case diagrams;
  2. Dataflow diagrams (Sources, Sinks);
  3. UML (Class diagrams);

  • Often a mix of documentation forms is used.
  • The system context must be documented precisely in order to be able to derive the pertaining requirements.

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