Requirements Modelling with Use Cases, User Stories, & Services

Business Analysts around the globe are returning to robust but practical modelling techniques because of dissatisfaction with list-based (“the system shall…” or “the system must…”) methods. Among these modelling techniques are Use Cases and User Stories, which get a lot of attention but often fail to live up to expectations

This workshop begins with a quick review of how Process Models and Concept Models (Conceptual Data Models) can make a huge contribution when approached from a non-technical perspective. Then we move on to showing how User Stories and Use Cases are used to discover external requirements – how users wish to interact with an application – and how Service Specifications are used to define internal requirements – the validation, rules, and data manipulation performed behind the scenes. The principle that makes this so successful is splitting the monolithic Use Case into an external view (Use Cases or User Stories) and an internal view (Service Specifications).

Course Topics

• Concept Models and Process Models – a quick review of these essential techniques, and the role they play in helping the Business Analyst define a future state.
• User Stories and Use Cases – how the application should behave externally in support of the people and processes using it, plus showing the two techniques are not really very different.
• Business Services – what the application should do internally regardless of who is using it, or how, which is essentially Service-Oriented Business Analysis.

Clear guidelines will be provided for:

• Progressing through well-defined Scope, Concept, and Detail (Specification) perspectives and levels of detail.
• Applying these techniques in an Agile setting, including dos and don’ts.
• Using these techniques in selecting COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) software packages.

We’ll also provide tips on facilitating discovery sessions, and simple but effective templates. As always, the methods will be illustrated with recent real-life examples and discussion.

Target Audience
Business analysts, systems analysts, UX designers, and developers responsible for defining application requirements, or documenting legacy/custom/packaged application behaviour in a structured way. Also, technical specialists interested in requirements definition, project leaders needing to understand current analysis techniques, and content experts with a significant role to play in specifying requirements.