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August, 2003 |
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Big
Turnout For Our August 5th Meeting "Use Cases and Business Rules" Ellen Gottesdiener Principal Consultant EBG Consulting  This
was a "don't miss" meeting, according to several attendees who had
been looking forward to hearing Ellen Gottesdiener, a former CIGNA
employee of some years back. Ellen was more than comfortable with the
crowd, mixing humor with experiences and "lessons learned" from her
many consulting engagements in various industries. "Don't embed
business rules in use-cases" was one of several tips she shared,
making reference to several other rules experts, such as Ronald Ross
and Barbara von Halle. As she noted in her talk, if your software results are typical, most of your delivered defects originate
in your requirements. You are probably using use cases as the way to capture your software's functional
requirements. They are also useful for organizing architecture, designing test cases, and partitioning
requirements into releases. However, if use cases are the guts of your requirements, you're missing
the point of the business: business rules. Business rules are at the very heart of functional
requirements. They provide the knowledge behind every business structure or process.
Ellen's talk
explored why you need business rules requirements, how they relate to use cases, and ways to
elicit, verify and validate functional requirements with business rules at the core.
Print her Presentation Slides from the meeting. Ellen Gottesdiener, CPF (Certified Professional Facilitator) is Principal Consultant of EBG Consulting, Inc., where she works with teams to help them explore requirements, shape their development processes and collaboratively plan and improve their work. Ellen is an expert in using facilitated workshops in software projects for chartering requirements and interim as well as end-of-project retrospectives. She is a pioneer in business rule-driven requirements workshops and in using participatory techniques to bring together technical and business people for shared outcomes. Prior to becoming independent, Ellen had a 13-year career with CIGNA Corp as a developer, analyst, trainer and project manager. In addition to her project consulting and facilitation work, Ellen presents seminars on requirements, facilitated workshops, object-oriented analysis & design and peer reviews. Author of the book Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs (Addison Wesley, 2002), Ellen has written numerous papers on requirements, workshops, methods and modeling. She is a frequent speaker at numerous industry conferences. Ellen is a member of ACM, IEEE, DAMA and IAF (International Association of Facilitators). She is on the Advisory Board for Software Development Conference and is technical advisor for the requirements section of stickyminds.com. We gave these five door prizes courtesy Addison Wesley
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