Tool Mentor: Using RequisitePro to Find Business Actors and Use Cases

Purpose

This tool mentor describes how to use Rational RequisitePro to record the results of finding business actors and business use cases.

Related Rational Unified Process activities:

Find Business Actors and Use Cases

Overview

To record the results of finding business actors and business use cases using RequisitePro (note that this activity can be performed in either Rational Rose or Rational RequisitePro:

You can find information on how to add a Supplementary Business Specifications document type to your RequisitePro project in Tool Mentor: Adding Templates to Your RequisitePro Project.

1. Document Business Actors

For each business actor you create a business actor requirement in the RequisitePro database. Even though RequisitePro is a requirements management tool, its architecture allows users to store any information that is related with requirements. You document business actors in RequisitePro and set traceability links between business actors and the business use cases with which they interact.

Each business actor’s representation in RequisitePro contains the business actor’s name, a brief description of the business actor. Each business actor is defined as a requirement of type BACTOR. To create a business actor requirement, follow these steps:

In RequisitePro, select Project=>Open from the Tool Palette
In the "Open Project and Documents" dialog, select your project.
Click "Switch to the Views workplace" on the RequisitePro’s Tool Palette.
From the Views, select File=>Open View and choose the view labeled "BACTOR: Actors List"
When the view is displayed, select Requirement=>Create from the Views menu. The Requirement dialog is displayed.
Enter the actor name in the Text field and select BACTOR as the requirement type. Click OK to dismiss the dialog.
Back in the view, enter the actor brief description text in the Brief Description column.

Since information pertaining to business actors is usually limited to a name and a brief description, actors are entered directly into the RequisitePro repository, as database-based requirements (as opposed to document-based requirements). In RequisitePro, requirements can be originated two ways:

in a Word document (these are document-based requirements),
directly entered in the requirements repository (these are database-based requirements),

You typically use document-based requirements when users would like to read the requirement within some context. Word allows you to add informational text around the requirement itself. Requirements that do not need context information to be understood clearly can be created as database-based requirements, directly from the Views workplace.

If you need to publish a business actor document, you can use the File=>Export to Word option from the Views menu. For readability, you might consider enlarging the height of the rows in the BACTOR attribute view, by dragging the row separators. This ensures that the brief description of actors is appropriately displayed in the created Word table. Alternatively, Rational SoDA can be used to create a more sophisticated report with some predefined text.

2. Document Business Use Cases

To document business use cases in RequisitePro:

Click on the "Switch to the views workplace" icon on the RequisitePro’s Tool Palette.
Select File=>Open View and choose the view labeled "BUC:Business Use-Cases List"
From the view, select Requirement=>Create from the Views menu. The Requirement dialog is displayed.
Enter the business use case name in the Text field and select BUC as the requirement type. Click OK to dismiss the dialog.
Back in the view, enter the business use case brief description text in the Brief Description column. Optionally set the Priority attribute.

3. Establish Traceability Links Between Business Actors and Business Use Cases

Each business use case is typically initiated by a business actor and may also interact with other business actors, as shown by the communicates-association in a UML diagram. We will set a traceability link between each business use case and business actor which have such an association, in order to help track the impact of any changes to either which will be shown by suspect links in RequisitePro. To set traceability links between business actors and business use cases, follow these steps:

Click on "Switch to the views workplace" on the RequisitePro’s Tool Palette.
Select File=>Open View and choose the view labeled "BACTOR-BUC:Business Actors/Business Use-Cases Associations".
In the displayed traceability matrix view, position the cursor at the intersection of the BACTOR requirement and the BUC requirement representing each BACTOR-BUC interaction.
Right click on intersecting cell and select Trace To from the pop-up menu.
Repeat steps 3-5 above for each applicable BACTOR–BUC association.

4. Record Supplemental Business Requirements

To create a Supplementary Business Specifications document, follow these steps:

From the RequisitePro’s Tool Palette, select Document=>New. The Document dialog is displayed.
In the field Name, enter "Supplementary Business Specifications" (this will be the way you refer to the Supplementary Business Specifications document in RequisitePro).
Enter a short description in the Description field.
Enter a filename (RequisitePro will use this filename when saving the Supplementary Business Specification to disk).
Select the "Supplementary Business Specification Document Type" outline as the Document Type.
RequisitePro will then bring up MS Word and open the newly created Supplementary Business Specification.
Fill in the document with the appropriate requirement information.

Once the descriptive text for each requirement is entered, follow these steps:

Select the text for each such requirement then select the "Create Requirement from highlighted text" icon from the RequisitePro’s Tool Palette to make it a RequisitePro requirement.
On the General tab of the Requirement Properties Dialog, select the Supplementary Business Requirement Type, and optionally assign some attribute values (such as priority, risk, etc). Click OK to exit the dialog.
Select Document=>Save to commit your work to the RequisitePro database. (note that none of your new requirements are actually committed to the database until you save the document).

5. Transfer Business Actors and Business Use Cases to a Rational Rose Model

If you are using Rational Rose to develop your business use-case model, you may transfer the business use-case requirements to the Rational Rose model.

To create the business use case and business actor elements in the Rational Rose model:

Select Tools=>Rational Synchronizer from the RequisitePro Tool Palette. The Rational Synchronizer Wizard appears. The first screen is a welcome message. Press Next.
You only want to create the Rational Rose items corresponding to the RequisitePro business use case and business actor requirements so you select "Update a subset of items" in the Wizard and press Next.
The next screen shows the projects you can synchronize with. Select the appropriate Rational Rose model and press Next.
The next screen presents synchronization options. Select Receive and press Next.
The next screen summarizes your choices. Make sure that it says that you have chosen to receive changes made to some items and press Finish.
The next window shows all of the items in the Rose project that will be updated and created. If you have made no other changes to the projects other than finding business actors and business use cases in RequisitePro, all of the items should have the Action column say Create and the Application say Rose. If this is not the case you need to analyze whether to cause the rules other than creating Rational Rose items to be executed. Select all of the actions you want to occur and press the "Commit Selected Actions" button or menu selection. The rules are executed, the items are created in the Rational Rose model.
Exit the Rational Synchronizer.

Rational Unified Process 5.1 (build 43)