Chapter 4- Business Use Cases - posted by Chelsia Palta
Understanding the Work
The product you intend to build must improve its owner’s work; it will be installed in the owner’s area of business and will do part of the work. It does not matter which kind of work it is commercial, scientific, embedded real-time, manual, or automated you always have to understand it before you can decide which kind of product will best help with it.
Use Cases and Their Scope
The term "use case" was coined by Ivar Jacobson back in 1987 as a way to describe an interaction between a system and a user of that system. Jacobson needed to break the system into smaller units, as he felt that object models were not scalable. Thus, to conquer the complexity and largeness of modern systems, he said it was first necessary to partition them into convenient chunks, and that these chunks should be based on the user’s view of the system.
The Outside World
Adjacent systems behave like any other systems: They contain processes and consume and/or produce data. You are interested in them because they are often customers for the information or services provided by your work, or because they supply information needed by your work. You can see these relationships by looking at the data flows on the context diagram. It is through these informational connections that the adjacent systems influence the work.
Time-Triggered Business Events
Time-triggered business events are initiated by the arrival of a predeter- mined time (or date). For example, your insurance company sends you a renewal notice a month before the anniversary of your policy; your bank sends you a statement on an agreed day of every month. “The arrival of a predetermined time” may also mean that a certain amount of time has elapsed since another event happened.
Business Use Cases and Product Use Cases
We have stressed the importance of understanding the work, not just the product. By looking at the larger scope of the work, you ask more questions about the business requirements and ultimately build a better product. The following example comes from a recent consulting assignment: The product is to rip a CD into MP3 or some other digital format. When the engineers looked at the technical part of the product (they are engineers, so naturally they are interested in technicalities), they saw a use case that was triggered by the insertion of the CD and then went on to rip the CD. Getting the best musical quality seemed to be the most important thing.
Business use cases are basically includes functional and non functional requirements as there are key activities from different stakeholders. Its processing time is continuous as long there is nothing left to do logically. All the systems have been notified and all the data to be stored by the business use case has been written to the data stores. In addition, it is most convenient unit of work to study in which you can identify stakeholders who are expert in each event. Business event are also based on business use case.
ReplyDeleteVery good points!! Highlighting some formality guide items related to Business Use Cases, we can mention that Rabbit projects should make use of business use cases to explore their problem scenario before starting to create a solution. Horse projects, that is how the Scotia Pay application project is classified, should divide the work area using business use cases as it is a very useful tool for discussing the current and future scenarios with the stakeholders. Finally, Elephant projects must definitely use business events since it is helpful to facilitate the clear communication among many stakeholders and a good tool for discussing the work in geographically distributed teams.
ReplyDeleteIn addition with this The Scope of the work in the commercial enterprise interest of any product is the activity which your clients and customers need to improve in the enterprise. To recognize this work, it is vital to relate this work with the outdoor global. It is the critical as all of the works is doing within the organization to provide the good first-class products and services to the customers in the out of doors international. Therefore, it is critical to take the data from the outdoor global and use them a satisfactory product for the quit customers of the product.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the emphasis on understanding the work in this chapter blog. I feel like understanding the work is easily one of the most important things a BA should do because when the BA completely understands the work then they can spread their knowledge in an easier and more efficient way to the people who could use it most. I also agreed with Ivar Jacobson's statement saying that use cases should be separated into chunks based on how the user would view the system.
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