uml

As a business analyst, one of the things you have to do sometimes is organize your client's thinking. For instance, I've worked on several projects where clients didn't know anything about the Unified Modeling Language (UML), or thinking about projects in terms of Use Cases and Actors. As a result, they came up with some very elaborate diagrams in an attempt to explain their thinking.

In my Use Case quality article yesterday I wrote about a "User Story" for a fictional "User Logs In" requirement. To complete that article, I promised to write a Use Case version of that same user story. Here then is that sample "User Logs In" Use Case, which you can compare to yesterday's User Story.

Free UML software tools FAQ: Can you recommend any free UML tools?

Over the last week or so I've been looking around again at free UML tools, and one that has really stood out is UMLet. While most UML tools try to do a lot of things, UMLet takes the "UML as sketch" approach, which I've generally come to agree with.

UML Use Case FAQ: Can you share an example of a Use Case diagram?

As I've been preparing to let other writers write on the devdaily.com website, I started to think about what different things (processes) an author would need to do on the website. As I thought about this, I started realizing that I was once again thinking like a business analyst, and then I thought I'd create an example UML Use Case diagram to show these processes.

Quite often when I'm asked to review UML "Use Case" that someone else has written, I ask "Have you tested your Use Case with real data?" Sadly, the answer is usually "no". I don't know why people don't do this, but they don't, and it seems like a very logical thing, essentially a unit test for Use Cases.