Cockburn & Associates

Cooperate to Win

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Duration:     1/2 Day, on location, usually in conjunction with consulting or other courses.

 

Description:   This course provides attendees with bothand practice in combining the graphical modeling techniques of the UML with written use cases. This is done by working sequenced exercises in small groups, and discussing the results with the class at large.

 

Audience:    This course is for anyone who is faced with using the UML to document the requirements for a software system. These people are typically from an IT department, but possibly from the human factors group, marketing department, or from a user community.

Goal:   The attendees will 1) be able to understand and produce well-formed UML diagrams that pertain to use cases; 2) be able to explain how written use cases affect UML diagrams, and vice versa; and 3) know the limitations of both written use cases and UML diagrams.

Cost:   $1,950 plus travel for the first 10 people, $70 per person after that.

·          Standard class size: 16 - 24 people.

·          Large class sizes: 36 - 50 people, larger only after careful discussion.

 

For further information, contact mailto:sales@CockburnAndAssociates.com?subject=Use Cases and UML, fill out the form found here, or call 801-947-9275

 

Contents of Course:

This course is based on continuous group exercises and discussions, rather than the slide-based lecture form frequently encountered in industry courses. each section of the course a set of concepts gets introduced, the groups do an exercise and discuss, and the entire room discusses their results. this way, each person gets to participate in both exercises and discussions.

The topics in the course include:

·          The UML diagrams that pertain to use cases:

à          Use Case Diagrams

à          Activity Diagrams

à          Collaboration Diagrams

à          Sequence Diagrams

·          Writing use cases in the Cockburn style (see Cockburn: Writing Effective Use Cases).

à          The four steps in writing a use case.

à          Finding the boundaries of the system.

à          Searching for actors and their goals.

à          Writing a simple scenario of usage.

à          Documenting exceptional and failure situations.

à          Linking use cases in an "Ever Unfolding Story".

·          Relationships between the written use case and the diagrams

à          Establishing the scope and level of a use case, and how this affects the diagrams.

à          Layering use cases for larger systems.

à          Decomposition of use cases and the subsystem hierarchy.

à          Relationships between use cases.

à          Common mistakes, subtle mistakes, mistakes with UML.

à          Alternative writing styles, alternative formats, alternative tools.

 

Exercises:

Several different domains will be used for exercises, for different degrees of difficulty. For each exercise, we shall write and/or diagram, then peer review and discuss the issues that came up.

Equipment needed:

Paper and pen/pencil, flipcharts to hang group work output on the walls.

Use Cases and the UML (1/2 day)