Declan Chellar

In Light Use Cases: Part 2, I promised I would talk about documenting business rules and data items relevant to a use case. Here I am, fulfilling that promise. Imagine a holiday company requires a system that allows it to, among other things, take bookings for holidays. I have modelled a “Take Booking” use case [...]

As a follow-on from Light Use Cases: Part 2, here is a short tutorial on modelling use cases as activity diagrams. It is best viewed in full-screen mode. Kind regards, Declan Chellar

I am fond of System Use Cases as a tool for documenting functional requirements, but I am not a big fan of use case specifications. I find the textual specifications result in the kind of weighty documents that everyone hates reviewing and I continue to be amazed that so many analysts start documenting a SUC [...]

Recently I was asked to take a look at some System Use Case (SUC) specifications. What I found was actually a description of a screen flow crowbarred into a SUC specification template. There are two questions you might be asking. What’s wrong with that? How does it come about? What’s wrong with that? The purpose [...]

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I have had discussions with colleagues about use cases (and seen discussions on LinkedIn) where it is clear that some people do not understand that there are different types of use case, so I hope the following definitions help. Business Use Case A technique for describing (in technology-agnostic terms) a business process which is invoked [...]

I am a great believer in facing up to reality, regardless of the pain involved. I don’t know whether it is my experience as a senior business analyst or my character or both that causes me to step in from time to time and say: “Stop! Time for a reality check!” How many times has [...]

Junior requirements analysts sometimes have difficulty with how to document business rules, or indeed, with recognising them in the first place. I hope this short article helps. Some Definitions “A rule under which an organization operates. A policy or decision that influences a process step.” (Data Warehousing Team, Georgetown University) “A statement that defines or [...]

I have found that people, from business SMEs to software developers, often confuse triggers and pre-conditions. Whether you are producing a business activity model, a process model (business use case) or a system use case, both concepts are relevant and the distinction is important. It is also important to be able to explain the difference, [...]