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
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WEREQ
Writing Effective Requirements
2 Days
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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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