Tag Archives: UML

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 4 : The “Famous Five” of requirements modelling

As I discussed in Rule 1, a common misunderstanding of use cases is that they are the software requirements. Unfortunately, this isn’t the situation. Use cases are merely an analysis tool – albeit a very powerful tool (when used in the right situation).

Use cases are just one technique for understanding and analysing the requirements. In order to fully understand the requirements our use cases are going to need some […]

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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 3: Never mix your Actors

The UML definition of an Actor is an external entity that interacts with the system under development. In other words: it’s a stakeholder.

Having analysed all your stakeholders (see Part 3 ) it’s tempting to stick them (no pun intended) as actors on a use case diagram and start defining use cases for each.

Each set of stakeholders (Users, Beneficiaries or Constrainers) has its own set of concerns, language and concepts:

Concerns.
Each stakeholder group has a different […]

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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 2: Understand your stakeholders

A Stakeholder is a person, or group of people, with a vested interest in your system. Vested means they want something out of it – a return on their investment. That may be money; it may be an easier life.

One of the keys to requirements analysis is understanding your stakeholders – who they are, what they are responsible for, why they want to use your system and how it will benefit them.

It’s important to […]

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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 1: Use Cases Aren’t Silver Bullets

There are a couple of popular misconceptions around use cases:

Misconception 1: The use cases are the requirements of the system

Contrary to what many engineers believe (and many authors have written) the complete set of use cases do NOT constitute its full set of requirements for the system.

A use case model is an analysis tool. They are a mechanism for organising the functional behaviour of the system and reflecting it back to the […]

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A Brief Introduction to 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

Since Jacobson defined use cases back in 1992 they have been subject to a vast range of interpretations.   Alistair Cockburn, author of Writing Effective Use Cases states:

“I have personally encountered over 18 different definitions of use case, given by different, each expert, teachers and consultants”

I am no different: this is my personal interpretation of use case modelling and analysis.  To qualify this statement though, this methodology is based on nearly a decade of requirements definition work on a number high integrity projects, […]

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Artisan – Aonix merger

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

Late last month the merger of Artisan and Aonix was announced. This is yet another interesting move in the supply of tools to the embedded systems community.

The tool market has seen a number of significant changes over the last year. It started just over a year ago with the acquisition of Telelogic by IBM.  At that time Telelogic were starting to become the dominant player in the embedded design tool market (predominately UML), based primarily around their Rhapsody tool […]

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