Visual Models for Software Requirements: Selecting Models for a Project

Exercise

The following exercise is intended to help you to gain a better understanding of how to use the information in this chapter. The exercise is open ended, and therefore the answer you come up with could be substantially different than the answer that we have provided. There are potentially many correct solutions. The answer provides an explanation of how we arrived at our solution. You will gain the most out of the exercise by attempting to do it yourself before looking at the solution. The answers for the exercises can be found in Appendix C.

Instructions

Identify the project characteristics and select the appropriate models for the scenario.

Scenario

You are on a project to launch a brand new eStore to sell flamingos and assorted lawn decorations, and you have to document all of the requirements. Currently, orders are only taken over the phone and manually entered into the order system by sales representatives. You expect to have thousands of customers visiting the website every day. You know that there will be servers that push catalog data to the website and send the orders on to fulfillment.

As you explore the high-level features, you also learn that the eStore orders will have various states, such as “New,” “Received,” “Packaged,” “Billed,” “Shipped,” and “Returned.” The president of Wide World Importers wants to view reports that show him metrics such as sales volume, inventory volume, and inventory costs by month. In addition, the training team wants to be sure that the process of shopping is well documented from the point at which a customer arrives at the website to when he receives an order confirmation after checkout.