Prevent expensive errors and omissions in requirements with a proven approach and methodology!
It’s well documented that the most common source of delays, cancellations and defects in systems development projects is our failure to understand the project requirements. We also know that the top two causes of requirements errors are lack of input from the users and missing or incomplete requirements. As you’ll see in Developing Requirements with Use Cases, identifying and writing high-quality use cases is significantly enhanced with active user input and participation. In turn, that user involvement helps to ensure that all desired system functionality and behavior is explored and understood early on. This both drastically reduces the number of missed and misunderstood requirements and also provides a sound way to manage requirements on very complex systems.
Practice advanced real-world tools and techniques for immediate application.
This two-day advanced course will build on your existing knowledge of the use case approach to give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for developing uses cases, discovering other types of requirements, and documenting them expertly. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will equip you with the capability and confidence to improve your project outcomes through better requirements and use case development. You’ll gain a thorough understanding of common requirements and use case pitfalls and challenges, practical approaches for discovering and writing use cases and requirements, and strategies for applying the use case methodology throughout the project life cycle in your organization. If you already know the basics of use cases and you play a role in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or consuming them as a developer, tester, or technical business user, you can’t afford to miss this course.
What’s the one approach proven to significantly enhance the quality of requirements, development, documentation, and testing?
It’s also one of the most straightforward and practical approaches invented to date: use cases. How can one approach make such a difference? Use cases offer a simple mechanism for involving users, developers, testers, and business customers in discussions throughout the lifecycle, starting from the very beginning of project initiation. Developing Requirements with Use Cases shows you multiple techniques to focus your stakeholders on the functionality they desire what they need the solution to do for its users and shows several ways to delineate firmly what’s in scope and what’s excluded, how to specify what’s required to build the correct solution, and how to demonstrate that the solution is, indeed, viable. No one that works on systems development projects should be without an advanced knowledge of use cases.
In-Class Group Exercises
Practical and realistic hands-on exercises and activities will allow you to refine and enhance your use case discovery and writing skills. Working in small groups, you and your peers will identify and discuss strategies and tactics that your organization should be using to better define project scope, discover requirements, and document and manage use cases.
Specifically, you will:
- Revisit project initiation to refresh your skills for determining and documenting project scope
- Review basic requirements elicitation and use case discovery methods
- Practice additional techniques for discovering actors, events, normal scenarios, and extension scenarios
- Work as a team to establish the appropriate level of detail for any use case
- Write complete, fully dressed use cases, as well as usage narratives and use case briefs
- Identify and write user stories and use them to discover and confirm use cases
- Produce well written use case diagrams and narratives
- Learn to identify includes and extends relationships in use cases
- Understand how use cases are linked for large and/or complex systems
- Improve your ability to write high-quality statements of requirements
- Review and practice deriving other requirements from use cases
- Review traceability issues and apply use case traceability to improve testing and quality
- Learn how use cases can improve your software testing and QA processes
- Explore ways to generate test procedures from use cases
- Understand how design elements can be derived from use cases
- Generate a plan for bringing these methods back to your organization
Immediate Benefits of Participating in this Workshop:
- More deeply understand the relationships between use cases and requirements
- See how use cases and user stories fit into the development life cycle
- Identify stakeholder interests and learn how they influence use cases
- Gain further exposure to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and some of its associated tools and models
- Use high-level scope of an IT project to identify the use cases that comprise it
- Improve project initiation by clarifying discussions of scope, increasing stakeholder involvement, and identifying exclusions and constraints up front
- Identify use cases for new or revised systems and determine the level of detail appropriate for your project and system
- Write clear and correct usage narratives and use case briefs
- Determine and document the main success and extension scenarios for use cases
- Translate users statements of needed system behavior and functionality into high-quality use cases
- Help to bridge the gulf between business customers and designers, developers, and testers
- Identify other requirements for a project from a use case, and review how to document those other requirements
- Understand includes and extends relationships and how to use them in documenting use cases
- Overcome common pitfalls and traps encountered when applying the use case approach
- Experience the power of connecting use cases to other types of requirements, elements of the solution development, and the testing and QA processes
- Enhance relationships with stakeholders throughout your organization and improve your ability to satisfy stakeholders from both the business and IT
- Help your organization understand and apply state-of-the-art methods for discovering and documenting project requirements
- Understand the connection between use cases and test procedures and the value of automated tools for large and/or complex systems
- Shorten project schedules by reducing errors that lead to revision cycles
- Reduce project costs and improve their quality by defining the right requirements the right way the first time, every time!
Who Should Attend
If you’re involved at all in defining and managing systems development projects, you simply must participate in this workshop. This course is perfect for you if you are a…
- Business customer, user or partner
- Business Analyst
- Business Systems Analyst
- Systems Analyst
- Systems Architect or Designer
- Systems or Application Developer
- Systems Tester
Leader of Systems project or teams
ASPE has been reviewed and approved as a CPE training provider for the National Assoication of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA). 12 CPEs are awarded upon full completion of Developing Requirements with Use Cases.
