Developing Requirements with Use Cases

Course: REQUSE

Duration: 3 Days

Level: I

Course Summary

Use Cases are an industry best practice for defining, documenting, and analyzing functional requirements. A use case approach is a user-centered approach to developing a solution to your business needs.

This course provides a strong foundation in the mechanics of use case diagramming and writing textual descriptions of use cases. In this highly interactive workshop, you will learn how to enhance and refine your use case skills, how to involve your stakeholders in the use case process, and how to develop use cases that provide valuable information to the designers and testers.

Use cases that meet the needs of designers can be too technical and too detailed for other stakeholders. Use cases that satisfy business users are usually not very helpful to designers and testers. How do you satisfy these two disparate interests? And how do you handle the details like business rules, data validations and user interface specifications? This Use Case Workshop will help you to clear up and manage the confusion. A Unified Modeling Language (UML) high-level business use case diagram is a visual tool that shows interaction between the environment and an evolving information technology solution.

A single business use case is a textual tool for representing how individual end-users and other involved parties or systems (collectively referred to as "actors") will interact with the proposed system.

What information belongs in a use case? How can a use case be utilized to capture all the desired functionality? Are use cases applicable to all projects? Is there a template for writing use cases that is considered best practice?

Knowing why you need a business use case, understanding how to document a use case in a template, when it should be created, and where to put specific information is critical to creating quality functional requirements. Without a common understanding of the purpose and structure of use case diagrams and the business use case document, use cases can quickly become "useless cases".

Using hands-on exercises and case studies, this workshop offers use case training in the basics of use case documentation and business use case diagrams as tools for business analysts, project managers, software engineers and other IT personnel. This training program explains the who, what, when, where, why and how of business use cases and use case diagrams.

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Topics Covered In This Course

Overview of Use Cases

Describe the purpose and value of a use case approach
Use case terminology
Introducing a use case Approach

Enterprise Analysis

Understanding the business context for your systems
Describe the key elements of Enterprise Analysis
Understanding the steps for developing use cases during enterprise analysis
Identifying business stakeholders, actors, and information
Understanding business process models and diagramming
Drawing and describing business use cases

Defining the System Scope

Utilizing a Context Diagram to define the scope of a system
Identifying system actors and distinguish between a primary and secondary actor
Analyzing the Business Process Model and System Context Diagram to identify candidate system use cases
Developing a system use case diagram
Writing a brief description of each use case

Evaluating, Prioritizing, and Packaging Use Cases

Reviewing use cases for priority, risk, complexity, and dependency
Grouping use cases that are interdependent
Focusing resources on the use cases that are critical to success of the project
Defining and organizing use case packages

Writing the Main Success Scenario (Normal Flow ? ?Happy Path?)

The normal flow scenario
Describing the sections of a System Use Case Description
Writing the steps of the main success scenario
Best Practices in writing use case descriptions

Writing the Other Scenarios (Alternate and Exception Flows)

Understanding the different types of scenarios
Identifying alternate scenarios and flows
Identifying exception scenarios and flows
Recognizing the difference between alternate flows and exceptions
Writing an alternate scenario description

Using Process Modeling to Describe the Flows of a Use Case

Overview of Activity Diagramming techniques
Using simple UML Activity Diagram notation to graphically describe the flows of a use case
Adding decisions, guards, and notes
Developing activity diagrams in a facilitated session
Tips on Modeling tools

Use Case Modeling Techniques

Building Diagrams of Use Cases
Representing the Actor
Use Case Diagram Symbols and Rules
Use Case Diagram Conventions
Advanced Use Case Diagrams
Modeling Inclusion and Extensions

Using Advanced Diagramming Techniques

Explaining when and how to use
Includes
Extends
Use case generalization/specialization

Developing a Requirements Specification

Use cases as a context for requirements
Common approaches to documentation
Quality of Service Requirements
User Interface Requirements
Business Rules
Reporting and Data Requirements
Tracing Requirements
Introducing business objects and classes

Supporting Quality Assurance

Ensuring quality use cases
Leveraging best practices to develop use cases that meet quality objectives
Verification & Validation: Reviews & Inspections
Quality attributes for use cases
Testing starts with use cases

What You Can Expect

At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will be able to:

Define the evolving role of business systems analysts
Describe the use of visual modeling as part of the software development process
Create a context diagram
Understand how several UML diagrams including use cases can augment the requirements process
Employ use cases to elicit requirements, at a business, system or subsystem level
Employ use cases to document the scope of a project
Write use cases in a clear and unambiguous way
Model use cases with workflow and activity diagrams
Plan and divide up the project work based on your use cases
Derive test cases from use cases
Manage a use case as it evolves over time and goes through many changes
Apply 5 methods for discovering use cases
Present the transition from business events to use cases
Illustrate the major components of the use case
Document proposed user interaction in use cases and use case diagrams
Structure basic use case information in a use case template document
Employ use case diagrams as a scoping tool
Document scenarios to discover use cases
Detail the sequence of interaction steps for the normal flow (happy path), alternative flow and exception flow situations
Determine how to handle alternate and exception situations in the use case template
Write audience-focused use cases
Review and critique use case documents and use case diagrams
Create and analyze activity diagrams to show use case flow of events

Who Should Take This Course

This workshop is intended for business and systems analysts, project managers, project team members, software managers, quality assurance analysts, developers, and consultants, and other software professionals who are or will be involved in specifying requirements for software systems and who want to learn how to successfully incorporate use case modeling and other methodologies into the requirements definition process.

Training Style

Instructor-led, group-paced, classroom-delivery learning model with structured hands-on activities and case studies.

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Related Courses

Code	Course Title	Duration	Level
USECS	How to Define and Document Use Cases	2 Days	I	Details
WEREQ	Writing Effective Requirements	2 Days	I	Details
BAREQ	Eliciting and Managing Requirements for Successful Software Development	3 Days	I	Details

Every student attending a Verhoef Training class will receive a certificate good for $100 toward their next public class taken within a year.

You can also buy "Verhoef Vouchers" to get a discounted rate for a single student in any of our public or web-based classes. Contact your account manager or our sales office for details.

Schedule For This Course
There are currently no public sessions scheduled for this course. We can schedule a private class for your organization just a couple of weeks from now. Or we can let you know the next time we do schedule a public session.

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