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 [...]

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, [...]

Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN)  is the notation developed by the Object Management Group/Business Process Management Initiative. I have just updated the following series of posts to bring them into line with BPMN, although you will see that I have added some colour coding: Introduction to drawing workflows Process exercise You can find a key [...]

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 [...]

I don’t own a car at the moment, mainly because I don’t need one. Combine my lack of need with a lack of interest in cars as accessories and you have someone who uses public transport a lot. Of course, it’s easy for those who live in or around Madrid because public transport here is [...]

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 [...]