Use Case and Application Logic

Use Cases and Application Logic:
Proven Techniques for Discovering Application Requirements and Business Rules

This highly participative workshop introduces proven techniques for discovering, documenting, and verifying application requirements. In three-tier architecture terms, it covers both the User Interface/Presentation and Application Logic/Business Rules layers. It uses an “outward-looking” form of use cases to define external (UI) requirements – that is, how a user will interact with a system. To define internal (AL) requirements – the validation, rules, and data updates performed “behind” the user interface – it covers a variety of techniques, including event analysis, state transition diagramming, and transaction logic specification. It also demonstrates important synergies between these techniques, as well as making use of the analysts other main techniques – data modeling and workflow modeling.

This unique class bridges the gap between simplistic list or prototyping-based approaches that are easily understood, but are too imprecise and incomplete for all but the simplest applications, and at the other extreme, techniques that are so complex they are indecipherable to most users and analysts, and thus produce results that are just as undependable.

Objectives

On workshop completion, participants will be able to:

Use a variety of techniques to identify a system’s use cases and business transactions.
Discover and document “external” application requirements, especially UI behavior
Discover and document “internal” application requirements, particularly logic and rules
Understand and apply the relationship use cases, transactions, and process or data models
Create and apply a set of use case scenarios that exercise and
demonstrate the use cases

Duration 2 days

Who Should Attend

Business analysts, systems analysts, and developers responsible for defining application requirements, or documenting legacy/custom/packaged application behavior in a structured way. Also, technical resources (programmers, UI designers, DBAs) interested in requirements definition, project leaders needing to understand current analysis techniques, and content experts with a significant role to play in specifying requirements.

Prerequisite

An understanding of data modeling

Course Format Lecture, group discussion, exercises

Instructor Alec Sharp