Duration

2 days

Overview

This 2-day course is designed to provide students with intensive, practical training in the concepts of requirements specification through use cases. During the course, the students write at least three non-trivial use cases. At course completion, students will have a comprehensive understanding of use cases, how to write useful and effective use cases, and both their value and limitations in either procedural or object-oriented development lifecycles. This course is compliant with the Business Analyst Book of Knowledge (BABOK).

Audience

Business or system analysts, technical managers, and software developers who wish to learn techniques for capturing requirements for software system development.

Prerequisites

Experience in requirements gathering, or systems analysis is desirable, but not mandatory.

Outline

Project failure and success factors

A brief summary of Use Cases

The many dimensions of requirements
Functional requirements
Non-functional requirements
Use cases are not diagrams
Where do use cases fit?

Dimensions of use case descriptions
Use cases and traditional specifications
Why use cases alone are not enough!

Discovering use cases
Using an event analysis model
Discovering actors & major use cases

The UML Use Case Diagram
Actors
Actor-to-use case associations
Use case-to-use case associations
include and extend
Generalization
Does the diagram have value?

Actors

Writing use case descriptions
The Three 'C's
Style and templates
Scope and presentation format
Use cases must have goals
System-level vs. business-level use cases
Adding exceptions to use cases

The power of "essential" use case descriptions
Procedural use cases
State-based use cases

Finding Functional Requirements From Use Cases

Major mistakes in use case development
Top Six use case pitfalls and abuses
Where UML can lead you astray
Just who should write the use cases?

The role of use cases in testing
Use cases are directly testable
Use cases and scenarios
Scenarios and test cases

CASE tools and use cases

Wrap-up