Generation of Use Cases via Activity Diagrams

[Weedman]

What do we use a modeling tool for?

I would venture to say to visually model the requirements, analysis, and the design of an application or system. We do this because a visual representation not subjected to personal preferences of semantics, and format as textual documents are. Words have different meaning to everyone and represent different visions of what is being stated. While a visual representation reduces or eliminates the various visual means by more accurately presenting what the author intended.

With that said our software process no longer creates textual use cases. Rather we create activity diagrams for all use cases. We then generate the textual use cases from the activity diagrams. This gives us a standardized look to the use cases, which also allows for standardizing the level of detail and content in the use cases. These generated use cases are what we have the Business sign off on.

Everyone else in IT now uses the model for requirements and basis the downstream UML artifacts on the activity diagrams in the model.

I have been trying to implement this methodology of activity diagrams and generate use cases as a report of the model at SRP where EA is the modeling tool we wish to use. I have successfully done this with Rose and SoDA but am having difficult time with the report generator in EA.

I have read a lot of forum requests to SPARX about various reporting needs and must say they all fall in line with what I need to create use case reports from activity diagrams. Almost all the responses are from developers wondering why we are asking to have filtering of selected elements, not repeating of headings like PRECONDTION when you have more than one of them, etc…

I really like EA much better than ROSE but need this reporting ability beefed up so I can get enterprise wide adoption of EA and my methodology at SRP.

Who can help me get this resolved or are there plans or some way I can use say crystal reports to go against the EA tables in the database?