To promote consistency in the contributed content, please read these style and composition notes for use cases. Thank you.

The guidance here is from the book Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn. The intent is to provide guidance to produce the smallest, essential parts of a use case.

The use case style is oriented to text descriptions of how the system behaves with respect to a list of Actors.

...

• Step 1: Find the boundaries of the system (Context diagram, In/out list).
• Step 2: Brainstorm and list the primary actors. (Actor List) 
• Step 3: Brainstorm and list the primary actors' goals against the system. (Actor-Goal List) 
• Step 4: Write the outermost summary level use cases covering all the above. 
• Step 5: Reconsider & revise the strategic use cases. Add, subtract, merge goals. 
• Step 6: Pick a use case to expand or write a narrative to get acquainted with the material. 
• Step 7: Fill in the stakeholders, interests, preconditions and guarantees. Double check them. 
• Step 8: Write the main success scenario. Check it against the interests and the guarantees. 
• Step 9: Brainstorm and list possible failure conditions and alternate success conditions. 
• Step 10: Write how the actors and system should behave in each extension. 
• Step 11: Break out any sub use case that needs its own space. 
• Step 12: Start from the top and readjust the use cases. Add, subtract, merge. Double check for completeness, readability, failure conditions.

Some Potentially Useful Artifacts

The In/Out of Scope List

A simple list of topics about the system and an indication of whether the topic is in or out of scope for the system's use case description. Useful at the start of the exercise, and later, to remind the team of the functional scope of the system. 

For this DG, functional topics related to identity assurance processes would typically be IN scope, while external processes or software details that support the assurance processes are probably out of scope (those are likely to be pre-conditions)

The Actor-Goal List

The Actor-Goal List captures the list of Actors that interact with the system, and their goals with respect to that system. The system operates a 'contract' between stakeholders; the use cases describe the functional behaviour of that contract. Stakeholders that are not present in the interaction have vested interests that should be satisfied (these might be understood as 'system guarantees'). Actors are a subset of Stakeholders.

We expect that analysis of the contributed use cases will result in a core list of stakeholders that are common to the identity assurance processes plus additional stakeholders that relate to process-specific or regulation-specific activities.

The Use Case Brief

The use case brief is a 2-6 sentence description of the behaviour of the system from the point of view of each actor in turn. It might simply be a short description of the main success flow. It is a brief expansion of the actor's Goal statement.

Continue with Chapter 6