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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A visitor to my blog commented on the post “No favourites” saying that her solution to the problem of being asked multiple security questions (none of which might apply) is to use a single word as the answer to all such questions. So no matter whether they ask what your favourite movie is, or what [...]

Some of you who were following the threads Introduction to Drawing Workflows and Process Exercise were wondering how the modelling techniques I use relate to Pegasystems’ PRPC, so here is a brief introduction. Version 5.4 Service Pack 2 of PRPC now allows us to document the high level requirements directly into PRPC using tthe DCO [...]

Use cases are a good mechanism for modelling functional requirements. However, I have met many skilled developers in the BPM world who disdain them and I think I know why. Use cases were invented for Object Oriented development using an OO programming language and so have certain characteristics that facilitate that type of development. They [...]

In Part 5, we documented the high level system requirements of our customer’s change control process. Now we use the HLSRs and To Be process model to build our workflow model. If you have not already read the series of posts on drawing workflows, then I suggest you do so before continuing. Click here to [...]