Individual Homework Assignment 3 (HW3)

Due Date

Objectives

• Practice writing a complete use case description.
• Practice writing an actor description.
• Practice producing a system sequence diagram for a use case.

Instructions

1. Create a complete use case description for the UTC system, covering the case where a distance student registers to take an examination.

2. Create a complete actor description, for the distance student who is the principal actor in this use case.

3. Create a system sequence diagram for the normal-case scenario of this use case.

Note that most of the examples you will find of sequence diagrams, including those in the notes on interaction diagrams are for applications later in the development process, during the design phase. In that later phase the entities interacting are classes. In contrast, the system sequence diagram is used in the requirements phase, and the entities interacting are not classes, but actors and the system.

Examples - from the Video Rental System

You can find examples of use descriptions and actor description in the example VRS SRS.

You can find examples of system sequence diagrams in the System sequence diagram notes.

Templates, Instructions, & Grading Criteria

• Use the use case description template (.doc) )
• Use the actor description template (.doc) (.html)
• Please try to use one of the UML modeling tools available for Eclipse to draw the system sequence diagram. Using the UML tools (UML2) that we showed you how to install for your use-case diagrams, I ran into what appear to be some shortcomings of the support for sequence diagrams. However, I am using the older (Galileo) version of Eclipse. If you have a newer version, you may find that it is better. However, I am now consider installing one of the other free Eclipse UML plugins, to do the sequence diagram. Do that if you need to, or if you find that you have sequence diagrams but the tool is missing some symbols, provide some sort of note to indicate what the problem was and how you worked around it. For example, if it does not allow actor symbols for timelines, use a box symbol and write in the name of the actor.

References

• This assignment: University Testing Center vision document
• Explanations of use case analysis and descriptions in Chapter 5 and explanation of sequence diagrams in Chapter 7 of Dennis, Wixom & Tegarden textbook
• The Video Rental System (VRS) example:
  • VRS vision document
  • Examples of use case descriptions and actor description in VRS Example SRS -- one of many possible variants
• System sequence diagram notes
• Sequence diagram notation information in Interaction diagram notes

Delivery

Follow the general instructions for delivering homework assignments. If you cannot put it all into a single PDF file, you may submit a zip-file.