Monthly Archives: November 2010

The Baker’s Dozen of Use Cases

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

RULE 7: Describe ALL the transactions

A use case, as the name implies, describes the usage of the system from the point of view of some beneficiary (our Actor). It is NOT (as I seem to spend my whole life telling people) is just the system function, organised as some sort of graphical ‘sub-routine’. This means the use case description must include the expected behaviour of the actors as well as the expected behaviour of the system.

This can […]

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Importing IAR EW 5.4 Projects into Parasoft C++test

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

Background

Recently I have been experimenting with Parasoft’s C++test tool for static analysis of C and C++ code. As part of this I went through the process of importing an existing C project developed in IAR’s Embedded Workbench toolset. Even though importing a project and checking it against MISRA-C isn’t too taxing, I though I would share my notes for doing

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The Baker’s Dozen of Use Cases

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

RULE 6: If it’s not on the Context or Domain models, you can’t talk about it

(If you haven’t already read it, I’d suggest having a quick look over Part 1 of the Baker’s Dozen to familiarise yourself with the fundamentals of use case descriptions.)

Engineers love to solve problems. It’s what they do. A use case model though is not a design model – it’s an analysis model. Use cases describe what the system should do, and in […]

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The Baker’s Dozen of Use Cases

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

RULE 5: Focus on goals, not behaviour

There is a subtle distinction between the functional behaviour of the system and the goals of the actors.   This can cause confusion: after all, the functional behaviour of the system must surely be the goal of the actor?
It is very common, then, for engineers to write use cases that define, and then describe, all the functions of the system.  It is very tempting to simply re-organise the software requirements into functional areas, each […]

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