1. Week 8 Lecture 1: Identifying Actors and Activities
SYS366
Week 8 Lecture 1:
Identifying Actors and Activities

2. Where are we? Identified Stakeholder categories/types
Identified business areas & basic processes
Completed interviews with stakeholder rep.
Identified Business Use Cases
Built a Business Use Case Diagram
Wrote Business Use Case Descriptions
NEXT: Create Actor/Activity Tables from Business Use Case Descriptions

3. Identifying Actors and Activities
Requirements Gathering
find out, in detail, what stakeholders require to achieve their goals
Allows the Analyst to clearly understand users’ requirements
Need to describe the interaction between users of the system and the system itself
Describes what the system is to do, not how it is going to do it

4. Requirements Analysis: Steps
1. Identify actors vs stakeholders
2. Identify business processes
3. Define the system boundaries

5. Stakeholders vs. Actors
A stakeholder is someone who has an interest in the system being developed  they may not actually use the system but they may be paying for the development of that system, they may receive the benefits of that system

6. Actors
An actor represents anything that interacts with the system  humans, devices, other systems, etc
Actors are not part of the system. They are outside of the system boundary but are visible to the system
Can make a service request of the system (initiating system activity)
Can be requested to provide a service (responds to a request initiated by the system)

7. System Behavior
System Boundary

8. Actors User Applications Devices Time Events
Somebody who maintains the data, uses the data or generates reports
Applications
External processes or software systems ( interface, DB repository)
Devices
External sensors (e.g. swipe reader may init security check & authorization)
Time Events
System clock, schedule nightly backup

9. Actors To Identify: actors that initiate activity on the system
Who uses the system?
What other systems use this system?
Who provides information to this system?
Does anything happen automatically?
non-initiating actors
Who gets information from this system?
What other systems does this system use?
Who is asked to provide additional information to this system to complete an action?

10. UML Notation Actors are represented in UML by a ‘stick’ person
“I am an actor. I play a role that involves using the system. I
am outside of the system.”
“My name indicates my role.”
Order Clerk
“I can be a person, a department, a system, hardware, scheduler, and so on”.

11. Actors An actor is NOT an object. (An object is inside the system.)
However, an object might store information about an actor. For instance:
Actor is Customer
Class is Customer Information
Object in the class stores information about a particular customer

12. Business Processes: System Behavior
An activity the system does to achieve its purpose
Purpose: satisfy an actor’s goal
Happens only inside the system boundary

13. System Behavior
System Boundary

14. Business Processes: System Behavior
Identifying Activities:
Ask the following questions:
What initial activity starts the process?
What processes achieve some business goal?
What are the different processes that are used?
What is the activity starts a series of interactions in the system?
Use ActionObject nomenclature to name the activity, e.g. RentCar

15. Actor/Activity Tables
Used to document the behavior of a system
Includes:
The person who initiates the activity (the actor)
other actors
The activities

16. Actor/Activity Tables
Sample Actor/Activity table:

17. Actor/Activity Table - example
RegisterRallyParticipationAAT.doc

18. OVER TO YOU
Write up the other 5 Actor Activity Tables for the Car Rally

19. Actor/Activity Table - example
ConsignGoodsAAT.doc

20. OVER TO YOU
Write up the other 5 Actor Activity Tables for Holly’s House