Use cases, process flow and entity relationships

[Wintermute]

This might - with any luck - sink off the boards without so much as a second read, but if any of you do know about all this stuff, I could do with a bit of help.

Anyway. I've got to rebuild a ticketing and membership system, from pretty well the ground up. And it's not small, in terms of users, business complexity or money. In short, it's a fucking big project.

Now... websites, I can do. Tell me you want your stock online bookable, or you want to put your photos of mice online, I'm your dude. However, this project is going to require <deep breath> actually planning and scoping out in advance. It's just too big for me to bang together a schema and tweak it into place as I develop the site around it. Plus which, my boss wants some funky diagrams to impress the client with.

So... ignoring for the moment the fact that the first thing I did was bang together a schema, the first thing I did was download a set of Visio UML 2.0 shapes and draw a lot of pretty flowcharts. So I've sort of specced out the business rules for tickets (as in, every ticket that can be bought and the combinations thereof, and the rules that apply to them), and the functionality that the system needs to offer to customers and to admin users.

Roughly.

Obviously, Google is my friend. I've been reading exhaustively and boy, is it fun. Just tell me about those low-fidelity prototypes one more time. But most of what I've seen is articles - pretty in-depth stuff about best practices and blistering attacks on the 5NF. Or something.

What I want is... well, to know what all these interesting Visio symbols actually mean, for one. What's the difference between a straight and a routable relationship? I know what classes and objects are - or I think I do - but what's a socket? Or a transition?

I want... to see some basic Use Case diagrams with their symbols explained. I want "this is how your generic customer-adding-ticket-to-basket would look in UML - these are your inputs, this is your process, these are your outputs."

I want... an explanation of code specification techniques for people who usually just write the code.

Err.. as you were, then

 

[cybertect]

I'm far from being an expert in the area (though I probably should get to know this stuff better myself so I've an excuse for looking at this at work ) but I suspect one of the words you're looking for in combination with "UML" is "glossary", which turfs up a lot of hits on google

I also found this handy UML Reference card that seems to cover quite a lot of ground with visual examples.

'scuse my randomness, I've a train to catch

 

[t0bytoo]

I posted a question a while ago asking for tips on learning UML. Had a look for the post, but it must have fallen off - i.e. I can't find it.

The project I was working on at the time was pretty complex, and there was an initiative to do all the analysis with UML, so i read a bunch of stuff and got the Sam's 24 hour book which I read in a couple of days.

I learned some good things - particularly modelling use cases, which can be done fairly simply with an 'actor', a few dotted lines and some arrows. Visio got really annoying as it tried to construct the class model dynamically, and the version I was using made it cumbersome to make small changes.

But what I did learn from the whole thing was that it was much easier, for me, to flush out ideas on a big sheet of paper, and copy out some diagrams later. I also found that none of the clients knew the first thing about UML, so I mostly gave them process diagrams with simple flow chart bits and pieces that covered the basic: State, Use Case, Deployment, Activity, etc.

Sorry, not much help... But there were a few folks on here who seemed pretty knowledgeable. I'm sure someone'll be on later.

 

[Wintermute]

I also found that none of the clients knew the first thing about UML, so I mostly gave them process diagrams with simple flow chart bits and pieces that covered the basic: State, Use Case, Deployment, Activity, etc.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm after here - I keep finding sites that deal with advanced methodology but all I want to do is draw a few flowcharts to illustrate the concept; but following a recognised standard. I just want the basics.

 

[cybertect]

If you fancy a bit of light reading about UML...