USe Case Scenarios - Easier way to enter

[supertaff]

Hi All,

We've been working with EA for a little while now in our architecture group and are trying to get our Business Analysts to move away from their word documents and put their use cases and requirements into EA.

While the Requirements side seems straight forward, the BA's are complaining about the ability to enter details of the scenarios for a Use Case.

I have to agree that the screen for entering the scenarios is a bit awkward.

Is there any better way than just the scenario tab to enter the use case?
Has anybody created an automation add in to make entering the scenarios easier?
Is it possible to import a Use case scenario from a word doc via the import csv interface?

Any help in this would be appreciated as I'm keen to get all our BA's entering their use cases in one place rather than in word documents.

Thanks

Mark Thomas
Virgin Mobile (UK)

[«Midnight»]

I can (sort of) answer one of your questions.

As far as importing the text from Word - and simple formatting like paragraphs - this should be very easy.

I recently needed to develop a general purpose lexicon for use by BA and subject matter specialists, not all of whom used EA. We wanted this to be reflected in our core EA models as well as other places.

We captured the information in tabular form in Excel - we could have used Word tables or any other well-structured format. I then wrote a very simple add-in that opened an EA model, cleared the glossary, and inserted all the information from our external lexicon. This is quite similar to what you need to do, although you'll have to capture use case names and such so your add-in will know where to put each scenario, or provide a run-time interface to let the user choose.

I wrote the add-in as an Excel macro in VBA. Not difficult at all, and it worked like a charm. I did not put it in the lexicon sheet - it obtained the location of the sheet and the EA model from the user at run time - so that the add-on and the lexicon would have different 'ownership' in the team. Another advantage of this approach is that there is no need to support a development environment, anyone sufficiently familiar with Office can maintain it in future.

HTH, David

[supertaff]

Hi,

Cheers for your reply David, look slike the BA's want to keep the info in their Use Cases in their Word format so have created them a linked document template so that they can enter their textual representation of the Use case in that instead of via the scenarios. It's not ideal but at least the Use Case document is kept within the EA Encyclopeadia instead of free standing on our network drive. Also as I control the template they use, we can enforce a structure on them.

One question, are you by any chance the David from BA who used to go to the System Architect conferences?

Thanks,

Mark

[«Midnight»]

I doubt that I'm the same one you are thinking of. Remember, I'm up here in the frozen wasteland (Ottawa).