In the previous chapter we saw the difference between a business use case and an application use case. In this chapter we discuss a process for deriving impacted AUCs from a BUC. 5.1    Overview

The BUC includes business process steps making up its workflow. Each of these steps has the option to be automated. The business analyst (BA), systems analyst (often the same person), systems architect and business process owners (BPO) determine between them which steps are to be automated. The systems analyst and architect roles are mainly to determine the time and cost to automate the business process. The BA and BPO will determine the return on investment (ROI) in order to determine if there value in automating a business process.

This section describes the advantages of using documentation styles and properties over ad hoc document formatting.

Microsoft Office was not intended as a software development tool yet analysts spend more time working with text in a word processing application than possibly any other tool. Why! Because it is the lowest common denominator application that everyone who needs access to the requirements, is familiar with. This means that analysts often find that their development tools are specified by the business. Can you imagine your programmers being told that the only tool they are going to be given to write code with is Notepad?

I like to think of requirements as a form of software, but at a higher level of abstraction than source code or design. Ideally they are expressed in a formal language, but previous attempts to specify requirements in anything other than a natural language have mostly failed. Why is this?

My website www.umllmu.com contains requirements training material for a complete process from business modeling through to systems analysis and high level design. It also includes templates for, and examples of, the artifacts that are created as a part of this process. The material is specific to the Rational Analysis tool suite, Rational Software Architect and Rational RequisitePro.

This document attempts to explain the subtleties and ideas behind the complete process and also to describe everything in software development tools independent process (by tools independent I mean that, as a minimum I expect the analyst to have access to MS Office). In particular, you will need MS Word, Excel and Visio, or equivalent applications.