Scope: Essential Use Cases

[chanos]

Hi EA community,

I've recently joined a project that is starting to produce 'essential use cases' from already modelled business processes.

We are realising steps of the business process into essential use cases. Within these essential use cases we are identifying which data is captured (from the business data model).

I'm struggling to determine the scope of each of these essential use cases as it goes down to the level of data being captured, a level of detail that has been different to my past experiences.

For example: within all our business processes we go through a series of registration steps to create a submission, however the data that is registered is different depending on the business process.

I've thought of having an essential use case called: 'Register a submission' but if the data captured in each of them is different then i'll have to create several use cases:

Register 'a Fruit' Submission
Register 'a Meat' Submission

I feel that this is too low level but i dont know if there is anyway around it.

If you have any rules of thumb / suggestions that would be great. I'll continue to trawl through this board to see if anyone else had similar experiences.


Appreciate your time.

[Robert Sheridan]

Is this similar to business use cases v system use cases? What you are describing sounds like system use cases and you could map them back to the generic business use case (we are looking to do something similar for reimplementing business functionality in different phases of a project).
I have also looked at using includes, extends and inheritance for handling variations on basically the same process.
Alternatively, you could just jump to activity diagrams.

Robert

[OneCent]

It also depends a little bit on the scope and your stakeholders. Who are they, what do they like to see, does it help to unterstand the system and is it business or technical.

Another point: Is "fruit" and "meat" static or do you want to design a more generic modell. Then you can put the information about the different data you need in external requirements. An you can refere in the flow to the requirement(s) or business rules.

[Dorian Workman]

These kinds of questions used to give me bad headaches.  Then I found the Iconix Process, and those headaches disappeared.  Check it out at www.iconixsw.com - I particularly recommend their book "Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML".