Task: Structure the Business Use-Case Model |
Structure the business use-case model to make the business requirements easier to understand and to maintain. This includes leveraging commonality amongst business use cases and actors, and identifying optional and exceptional behavior.
Disciplines: Business Modeling
Purpose
Structure the business use-case model to: Extract behavior in business use cases that need to be considered as abstract use cases. Examples of such behavior includes common behavior, optional behavior, exceptional behavior, and behavior that is to be developed in later iterations. Find new abstract actors that define roles that are shared by several actors.
Relationships
Roles | Primary Performer: Business Analyst | Additional Performers:
Inputs | Mandatory: Business Use-case Model | Optional: None
Outputs | Business Use-case Model
Steps
Identify common business requirements
Understand the requirements that are common to more than one business use case, or that describe optional or exceptional behavior. Understand. Review each completed business use case and note any commonality or exceptional behavior that's not tightly coupled with the rest of the business use case.
Organize business requirements in business use cases
Move the identified business requirements to more appropriate business use cases to make understanding and managing the business use cases easier. Use <<include>> and <<extend>> relationships between business use cases to maintain the appropriate scenario flow across use cases.
Establish generalizations between actors
Model common characteristics between actors. Write a brief description of the actor-generalizations, and include them in use-case diagrams for further clarification. See Guideline: Using Actor Generalization for more information.
Organize the business use-case model into packages
If the business use-case model has a large number of elements, consider organizing the business use cases into use-case packages. Focus on making the business use cases easy to locate for someone unfamiliar with the model.
Evaluate results
Discuss the incorporation of include-, and extend-relationships with the customers and stakeholders, and assure they have a clear understanding of the system based on the updated business use case model.
Alternatives
If it's difficult or awkward to represent common requirements by structuring the business use case mode, consider moving common content into other requirements work products instead of refactoring the model.
More Information
Concepts | Communicate Association
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