Organizing use cases

Hi,

I thought I would send some thoughts on tomorrow's agenda topic of organizing use cases.  I find it hard to track so many use cases, each with different background and level of detail.  I thought I’d share with everyone our process to organize use cases in the W3C Provenance XG [1] that I chaired a few years back.  I thought it was a good process, and it paid off in terms of helping the group to focus and be productive.

We first developed a use case template [2], just like you all did.  Then we solicited use cases from the group, and actually approached specific communities or individuals that we knew had important or different use cases.

In parallel, we had a smaller group developing a set of dimensions that were important to provenance [3].  These were useful to detect the coverage we had of use cases, and also to relate the use cases to one another.

We also curated the use cases as they came in.  We had a small curation group, they iterated with the use case authors.  The curators annotated what dimensions were addressed by each use case, following some curation guidelines we developed [4].  We also discussed whether to merge or generalize use cases [5].  That led to the final use cases [6].

We then synthesized 3 major “scenarios” by taking pieces of different use cases [7].  Each scenario had a theme to it, so that the requirements would tell togeher a nice story in the scenario rather than being separated into smaller use cases.  From then onwards, we only discussed these scenarios.  

I believe having only 3 scenarios helped the group a lot, as it was easy for everyone to keep only 3 scenarios in mind (as opposed to 30 use cases).

Hope this is helpful.  We can discuss this more during the call tomorrow.

Best,

Yolanda


[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Use_Case_Template
[3] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Use_Case_Report#Provenance_Dimensions
[4] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Talk:Use_Case_Template
[5] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Use_Case_Report#Actions_Taken_on_Use_Cases
[6] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/wiki/Use_Case_Report#Use_Cases
[7] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/prov/XGR-prov-20101214/#Flagship_Scenarios



Yolanda Gil
Director of Knowledge Technologies, USC/ISI
Associate Director for Research, Intelligent Systems Division, USC/ISI
Research Professor of Computer Science
Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292 (USA)
+1-310-448-8794
http://www.isi.edu/~gil
@yolandagil

Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2015 07:44:32 UTC