Use Cases In Depth for Business Analysts
2 days
Description
Use cases are at the core of a powerful technique for gathering, organizing and verifying users’ business-systems requirements. Many shops have successfully managed to tap into the power of use cases for requirements elicitation and capture, architecture, design, programming, and testing.
Other shops, however, haven’t mastered use cases and have failed to achieve much benefit from them. There are reasons for these use-case failures and this course shows how to avoid those pitfalls.
In this course you will learn what use cases are and how to use them to understand, model and validate user requirements quickly but precisely. The course covers not only use cases but also the little-known technique of business-event modeling. It shows how a through understanding of business events leads quickly to a clear, useful set of use cases. It continues by showing you how best to organize your use cases for validation and how to define use cases both distinctly and succinctly.
Not forgetting project managers and team leaders, the course also shows how use cases form the backbone of the project for clearer planning and tracking.
During the course you will practice designing and developing use cases on a real business application and will have ample opportunity to discuss your specific use-case questions with the course instructor.
Important note: In recent years, use cases have been equated with object-oriented system development. Not so! This course shows how use cases can assist any kind of system development or package evaluation. It’s definitely not restricted to object-oriented organizations. Everyone is welcome!
Contents
In this course we will cover:Introduction
- What is a use case?
- Examples of use cases
- Use case model deliverables
- Why use cases?
- Who produces use cases — and from what?
- Who consumes use cases?
The context model
- The context model: Purpose and example
- Context model symbols: system, actors, flows
- People, jobs and roles
- Role maps
Modeling business events
- The business-event model
- Definition of a business event
- Roles and business events
- Business-event types and occurrences
- The business-event thread
- Kinds of business events
- Organizing business events: by actor, by level, by scenario
From events to use cases
- Definition of use case
- The event-reporting chain
- "Who" are the actors?
- Properties of the various actors
- Event recognition revisited
- Relationships among roles, events, use cases
Use cases
- Charactieristics of a good use case
- Use-case notation
- The use case template
- Use case narrative
- Use cases as a repository of business functionality requirements
- Factoring use cases
- Include and extend constructs
- Informative, interrogative, imperative use cases
- Business rules: Preconditions and postconditions
Use cases and quality-of-service requirements
- Response time
- Use-case matrices
- Using use-case statistics
Use Cases and Project Management
- Managing a use-case project
- Use cases in agile projects
- How to succeed and how to fail (your choice!) with use cases