Cast Of Characters

Cast Of Characters

Also Known As

Can?t Tell a Widget from a Gadget without a Program.

Standards are Wonderful; Everyone Should Have One.

Problem

How do you keep use case terminology consistent and not have it deteriorate into a tower of Babel of competing terms?

Context

The development team is trying to create a Requirements Model for a new system and it is important that the model describe the requirements clearly and consistently

Forces

Business Setting: Conflicting Cultures

There are vocabulary differences between different groups where different terms are used to refer to the same concept.
Many concepts are similar and it is important to know what distinguishes these concepts from each other.

Team Composition: Communications

Multiple participants working on a project view project from different levels of abstraction.
Members of the requirements team may have narrow subject matter expertise and it difficult to maintain a consistent terminology.

Solution

Maintain a central glossary that describes the terms that shall be used for naming use cases and writing use case descriptions.

Resulting Context

The unbalanced forces in this pattern inhibit the clear communication of concepts between requirements team members. By creating a central glossary, the requirements team is forced to agree to use the same terminology for concepts. This helps to reduce the opportunities for mis-communications between requirements team members.

Furthermore, by agreeing to a common terminology it will help force all requirements team members to view requirements from the same level of abstraction.

Rationale

Left to their own, everyone will either use the terminology that they are most familiar with or invent their own terminology for the same concept. For example, domain experts will use the common terminology of the problem domain, programmers will try to create generic noun phrase. Without a central repository naming and defining the concept it becomes very difficult to understand a use case description.

Basis Patterns

Consider using NegativeConsensus and/or MultiVoting to establish the glossary.

I think we need more focus on this issue of consistent level of abstraction.

I think I prefer the name DramatisPersonae? (not to be confused with PersonaNonGrata? (-: ) in keeping with the stage or acting metaphor.