Deriving use cases from business process models

Abstract

Use cases are intended to capture the functional requirements of an information system. The problem of identifying use cases is however not satisfactorily resolved yet. The approach presented in this paper is to derive use cases from the business system models that are produced by applying DEMO (Demo Engineering Methodology for Organizations). These models have three attractive properties: essence, atomicity and completeness. Essence means that the real business things are identified, clearly distinguished from informational things. Atomic means that one ends up with things that are units from the business point of view. Complete means that no business things are overlooked and that the models do not contain irrelevant things. A three-step procedure is proposed for deriving use cases from these models, such that they do possess the same properties of essence, atomicity and completeness. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.