Implementation of Use-Case Model to solve the miscommunication problem in requirement collection process

Abstract

Under the keen competition of telecommunication market, to maintain and increase the market share, Com-S (The company I’m working now, hereafter refer as “Com-S”) needs to maintain the quality of service and to create more value-added services to customers. As more and more value-added services created, there is a need to update the existing applications and to develop new applications for both running the services and supporting the customer services. Requirement collection is an important stage of application development and application update, with experiences gained in previous requirement collection stages, miscommunication problem among intra-business unit end users, third party stakeholders, System Development Unit colleagues is discovered to be the main issue that has greatly affected the quality of the system being developed and also the service level of Com-S. In order to overcome this problem, the Use Case Model is recommended to apply in the requirement collection process, and three stages, namely “Analyzing the problem”, “Understanding the users and stakeholders need”, and “Developing the supplementary specification” are involved in implementation. “Analyzing the problem” is focus on identifying problems, searching root causes, presenting the boundary of the suggested application being developed graphically, and listing out all constraints that the system is facing and their reasons behind. Interviews are the main course of “Understanding the users and stakeholders need”. By interviewing users and stakeholders, our SDU colleagues can collect more clear and adequate requirements. Guidelines and sample question sets will be created to ensure the quality of interviews. All collected information will then be sorted in accordance to the level of importance, under which decision will be made in corresponding to the requirement with higher priority. “Developing the supplementary specification” is the stage of collecting non-functional requirements, which have not been collected in previous two stages. Non-functional requirements include the usability, reliability, performance, and supportability of the new or updated application. Design and layout requirements (if any) and the non-functional constraints are also being discussed in this stage. A supplementary document is created for recording all the requirements for further references. Formal and instructive guidelines greatly help in ensuring the quality of each requirement collection process. And the implementation of the Use Case Model can lead to the creation of these guidelines which can be shared among SDU colleagues in order to enhance the overall quality of the new application development.