3. System diagrams

A system diagram may be used in both the Requirements Document and the design stage. With the design stage setting out the architecture of the new system to be developed.

The system diagram above is a very basic example, but the essentials are shown. Namely the new system is shown as a collection of sub-systems and classes of people (employee) interacting with the system. Arrows and labels describe the direction and nature of the interaction.

For example, an employee sends a request for information to the company intranet, this then interrogates one or more company databases to obtain the information. It then sends back a nicely formatted version of the information.

System diagrams come in many forms - it is down to the skill of the system analyst to create an effective one.