Course Description

Use Cases are an industry best practice for defining, documenting, and analyzing functional requirements. A use case approach is a user-centered approach for developing a solution to your business needs. Unfortunately, methods for developing use cases vary substantially across the industry. 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? If you've ever been involved in a project involving use cases, you've probably encountered some confusing answers to these questions. Learn practical answers to these questions from one of the pioneers in Object Oriented Analysis. We have been developing and sharing best practices in use cases since the early 1990s.

This 2-day 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?

Learning Objectives:

• 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 diagrams

• Plan and divide up the project work based on your use cases

• Manage a use case as it evolves over time and goes through many changes

• Develop a Business Use Case Diagram

• Identify system actors and distinguish between a primary and secondary actor
  Analyze the Business Process Model and System Context Diagram to identify candidate system use cases

• Develop a System Use Case Diagram and learn to write a brief description

• Evaluate use case risk, complexity, priority, and dependencies to: describe how to organize use case packages

• Write the steps of the main success scenario

• Identify and develop alternate scenarios and flows

• Explain how a UML Activity Diagram supports a use case approach