Activity Diagrams
Rational Rose is not able to model activity diagrams!
- So model on a piece of paper using pencil and ruler the following description of the use
case "Software Development":
- In this use case three actors are involved: customer, developer, and analyst. The use
case is subdivided into four phases: inception, elaboration, construction, and transition.
In the inception phase the customer establishes the business rationale for the project and
decides on the scope of the project. If the risks for the project are too high and the
benefits seems to be too low, the project is canceled.
- Elaboration is the phase where the analyst collects more detailed requirements in use
case diagrams, does a high-level analysis using activity diagrams, class diagrams, and
interaction diagrams, and designs a baseline architecture using advanced class diagrams
and state diagrams, and create the plan for construction. Therefore he asks the customer
for his requirements, and the customer responds. The analyst captures the requirements in
requirements documenst, which have to be reviewed by the customer. This questionaire is
repeated until all requirements are captured and reviewed.
- Construction is an iterative and incremental process. In each iteration the developer
builds production-quality software prototypes, tested and integrated as subset of the
requirements (captured as use cases) of the project. Note that certain prototypes may be
built in parallel and integrated later on - depending on the requirements (overlapping use
cases block the parallel build process).
- Transition contains beta testing by the customer, giving feedback to the developer,
performance tuning by the developer (done in parallel to beta testing), and user training
from the developer for the customer (also done in parallel). If the tests reveal no more
errors, the performance is sufficient, and all users have reached a certain skill level,
the software development process ends - and gives way for our second use case: Software
maintenance!
