How to Derail Use Case Analysis: Focus on the Processes

It's easy to prevent successful use case analysis: make it into an exercise of defining lots of "processes" in excruciating detail.

First, ignore all "objects" definition.  All business domain entities -- and actors -- must be treating as second class artifacts.

Second, define everything as a process.  A domain entity is just some stuff that must be mapped between processes.  Act like the entity doesn't really have independent existence.

Symptoms

You may be trying to do use case analysis, but if you have these symptoms, it might be time to step away from the process flows and ask what you're really doing.

There Are No Actors.  Well, actually, there's one actor: "user".  When all of your use cases have one actor, you've forgotten the users and their goals.  Stop writing the processes and take a step back.  Who are the users?  What are they trying to accomplish?  Where is their data?  When is it available?  What interactions with a system would make them happier and more productive?

Every Action Defines A New Class of Actors.  You have actors like content creators, content updater, content quality assurance, content refinement, content link checking, do this and do that.  Too many actors is easy to spot because the attributes and behaviors of all those actors are essentially identical.  In this example, they all edit content.

Each Use Case is a Wizard.  If each use case is a strictly sequential input of a data element followed by "click next to continue", you've taken away the actor's obligation to make decisions and take action on those decisions.  If you're lucky, you've got a use case for each individual goal the actor has.  More typically, you've overlooked a fair number of the actor's goals in your zeal of automating every step of one goal. 

You Need an "Overall Flow" or Sequence for the Use Cases.   If your use cases have to be exercised in one -- and only one -- order, you've taken away the actor's goals

Collaboration

Use Case analysis describes the collaboration between actors and a system to create something of value.  If the system is described by wizards or modal dialogs that completely constrain the conversation to one where the system asks the actor for information, something's terribly wrong.

The point is to describe the system as a series of "interfaces", each of which has a use case.  The actors interact with the system through those interfaces.    The actor is free to gather information from the system, make decisions, and take action via the system.

War Story

The users had a legacy "application" that was a pile of SAS code that did some processing on the source data before reporting.

The use cases were -- essentially -- "1.  Actor runs this program  2. System does all this stuff."  The "all this stuff" was usually a lengthy, complex reverse engineering exercise trying to discern what the SAS code did.  

No mention of the business value.  No reason why.  And no room to implement a better process.

War Story

Analyst is pretty sure the user wants collaborative editing.  The analyst has a pretty good "epic" (not a proper user story, but a summary of a number of user stories) that describes creating, modifying and extracting from a collaboratively edited document.

The initial discussion lead to every single verb somehow defining a separate actor.  In the original epic, there were exactly two actors, one who added or elided certain details for the benefit of another.

Later discussions lead to a single "User" actor and the craziest patchwork of use cases.  Random "might be nice to have"s crept in to the analysis, and the original "epic" was dropped.  No trace of it remained, making it very difficult to determine priorities.

War Story

Users had developed a complex work-around because they didn't have all the equipment they needed in their local office.  It involved mailing CD's from one office to another to prevent network bandwidth problems.  The business analysts wanted to capture this process, even though parts of it created no value.

It took a fair amount of work to get the analysts to stop documenting implementation details (mailing addresses, Fedex account numbers) and start documenting interactions and the business value that was created.  

Many process steps are physical moves and don't involve making information available for decision-making.  Those no-decision physical move steps should not be described in a use case.  Perhaps in an appendix, but their incidental because they're just the current implementation.  A use case should have the essence of the business value and how the actor uses the system to create that value.