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In the course of project the following lessons were learned regarding the later stages of the Requirements Elicitation effort:

  1. There is value in establishing a requirements/use case analysis roadmap, as a communication tool to highlight key stages in the process, roles involved and artifacts produced, as well as showing the influence of the new SAIF/ECCF directions; one such roadmap is shown in Figure 2-2; this was also confirmed by the existing analysts on the team.
  2. The different use case levels bring in certain subjectiveness, e.g. whether some use cases are at Kite, Sea or even Underwater level; this needs to be kept in mind when documenting the use cases in the EA repository; to address this the following heuristics can be applied.
    • i) First consider the granularity of steps mentioned in the use case description
    • ii) If steps are of low granularity, the use case can be at a Sea or Underwater level, identifying one or more possible technical services to support the functionality in the steps
    • iii) In the case of a Sea vs Underwater dilemma, apply the reusability principle, i.e. if reusable, it is an Underwater candidate
  3. There appear to be some issues with how the EA tool handles UML use case stereotypes developed for the purpose of supporting different levels. This may need to be revisited in the future.
  4. It would have been useful if an ontology-style facility was available to search for use cases, actors or use case goals; the benefit would be even higher in larger scale projects, which would need to support a larger number of stakeholders and analysts/architects.
  5. There was not sufficient time to fully explore the value of the ODP community concept from the point of view of ECCF traceability. There is recognition however by the team members of the value of the community concept in supporting the development of a community-based ontology as well as its importance in encouraging thinking about the importance of policy design.
  6. The current approach was mostly broad but shallow coverage, and only in one example (i.e. 21090 datatype support) was there an attempt to provide a deep coverage; if there is more time for this project, there should be more effort committed in this direction to facilitate handover to software developers.
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