Monthly Archives: February 2011

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

Use cases have become a core part of the requirements analyst’s arsenal.  Used well they can bring dramatic increases in customer satisfaction and a whole host of other subtle benefits to software development.

The use case itself is very simple in concept: describe the functionality of the system in terms of interactions between the system and its external interactors.  The focus of the use case is system usage,  from an external perspective.

Despite this apparent simplicity, requirements analysts frequently struggle to write […]

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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 13: Say it with more than words

Use case descriptions are most commonly written in text format (albeit often a stylised, semi-formal style of writing). Text is a very effective method of describing the transactional behaviour of use cases – it’s readily understandable without special training; most engineers can produce it (although the ability to write basic prose does seem beyond the capability of many!); and it is flexible enough to deal with complex behaviours – for example, variable numbers […]

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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 12: Avoid variations on a theme

A common affliction amongst novice use case modellers (particularly those from a development background) is the desire to fettle the use case model – to organise it, revise it, balance it; and generally make it look more like a design model.  Unfortunately, beyond a certain point this effort actually starts to degrade the utility and effectiveness of the model.  More and more effort is put into a model that becomes less and less useful […]

Posted in Design Issues | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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 11 – Don’t abuse «include»

A use case contains all the steps (transactions) needed to describe how the actor (our stakeholder) achieves their goal (or doesn’t; depending on the particular conditions of the scenario). Therefore a use case is a stand-alone entity – it encapsulates all the behaviour necessary to describe all the possible scenarios connected to achieving a particular end result. That’s what makes use cases such a powerful analysis tool – they give the system’s requirements context.  Use […]

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