Artifact: Business Use-Case Model
| Input to Activities: | Output from Activities: |
Purpose
The following people use the business use-case model:
- The customer to approve that you understand the business context before you to continue to system development.
- The architect to identify architecturally significant behavior that should be automated.
- The system analysts to better understand the context of the system.
- The manager to plan and follow up the business modeling effort and subsequent software development.
- People outside the project but within the organization, executives and steering committees, to obtain an insight into what has been done.
Properties
|
Property Name |
Brief Description |
UML Representation |
| Introduction | A textual description that serves as a brief introduction to the model. | Tagged value, of type "short text". |
| Survey Description | A
textual description that contains information not reflected by the rest of
the business use-case model, including: ╖ typical sequences in which the business use cases are employed by users; ╖ functionality not handled by the business use-case model. |
Tagged value, of type "formatted text". |
| Business Use-Case Packages | The packages in the model, representing a hierarchy. | Owned via the association "represents", or recursively via the aggregation "owns". |
| Business Use Cases | The business use cases in the model, owned by the packages. | Owned recursively via the aggregation "owns". |
| Business Actors | The business actors in the model, owned by the packages. | - " - |
| Relationships | The relationships in the model, owned by the packages. | - " - |
| Diagrams | The diagrams in the model, owned by the packages. | - " - |
Timing
The business use-case model is created during inception and early elaboration.
Responsibility
A business-process analyst is responsible for the integrity of the business use-case model, ensuring that:
- The model as a whole is correct, consistent, and readable.
- That it covers enough of the business to provide a good basis for building systems.
Note that the business-process analyst is not responsible for the business use-case packages, business use cases, business actors, relationships, and the diagrams themselves; instead, these are under the corresponding business designer's responsibilities.
Tailoring
If the purpose of the business modeling effort is to reengineer the target organization, you should consider maintaining two variants of the business use-case model: one that shows the business actors and business use cases of the current target organization (sometimes called as-is), and one that shows the envisioned new business actors and business use cases (to-be).
If you are considering a significant redesign of the way the target organization works (business reengineering), this separation is needed otherwise the redesign will be developed without knowing in the end what the proposed changes really are, and you will not be able to estimate the costs of those changes. It is like an architect who is asked to draw up plans for changing a town-house into three flats, without having an as-is blue-print to work from.
The cost of maintaining two business use-case models is not insignificant, and you should carefully consider how much effort you put into an as-is model. Typically, you would not do more than identifying and briefly describing the business use cases and business actors. You would also briefly outline the business use cases you determine are key to the effort, possibly illustrated with a simple activity diagram. The level of detail you choose should aim at providing a shared understanding of the target organization.
You would not need this separation if:
- there is no "new" organization (the goal is to document an existing organization).
- there is no existing organization (business creation).
