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Mastering the Requirements Process, Second Edition
The authors of this book suggest that the beginnings of Requirements Gathering should focus on delving into the work of the organization. That you should be focused on learning what the actors in the scenarios will do as a whole, and not just how they will work with an automated system. That by learning the scope of the work for the whole organization you will be better able to provide opportunities for innovation. They also feel that you can best target the needs of organization by partitioning the work and the use cases according to externally facing categorizations, not internal ones. Basically how do the Customers see the organization and where the business flows should go should drive the work instead internal structures.
Business Events and Use Cases
Business Events are events which drive the work. The authors suggest taking a step back from your business events to think about where and what the real event it. When a customer calls a helpdesk, that is the event, however the authors suggest that frequently designers and requirements gatherers will consider the logging of the call the event. This change in focus and divorcing the technology from the business events allows you to start thinking about the requirements from new perspectives and come up with innovative solutions.
The authors suggest building a set of business events for each of the major elements of work. These business events will allow you logically group together aspects of the work which the system is designed to support.
Each business event will have a use case associated with it. This use case is the business's response to the event. It will include a set of identifiable processes, data stored and retrieved, and any information communicated in and out of the business. Each Use Case should be a single event with almost no direct connection to any other Use Case, this allows different analysts to move along their avenues of inquiry without an overwhelming amount of communication constantly necessary.