This module provides students with an introduction to the facade layer. The facade layer provides a unified interface to a set of interfaces in the business logic layer and the data access layer (DAL). This module presents the two types of facade layers: the Web services facade layer and the business facade layer.

This module provides students with knowledge about how to use behavioral design patterns in the transition from conceptual to logical design. Students will also learn how to apply this knowledge to a sample application: an Automated Teller Machine (ATM).

This module provides students with a summary of the important logical and physical design considerations for each of the layers in the Enterprise template.

In this course, you do not complete all of the work in the Envisioning Phase. However, by developing a preliminary vision document, you can organize the information that you have gathered and analyzed to summarize your progress to this point. In this activity, you will create a preliminary vision document by using information that you have developed from previous activities, as well as developing new information from the Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. case study.

Dynamic models provide the development team with a detailed picture of the relationships of use cases and usage scenarios. The models provide current state descriptions of the workflow processes and important task sequences. In this activity, you will develop activity, interaction, and state models for the Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. case study.

Models represent a powerful tool to describe and analyze business requirements. You can develop extremely complex models that provide detail about how a system currently works, or develop models that describe business processes to users and stakeholders. In this activity, you will discuss how you can use models to describe and analyze business processes and requirements.

Requirements indicate to the project team what the final business solution has to do to address the business challenge from the business and user perspectives. Wants indicate what people would like to see in the solution to the business challenge. The development team will incorporate wants that improve the final product and provide value-added features for the users. Constraints play as important a role as requirements. If a final solution does not adhere to the constraints of the business environment, the project team risks developing a product that will never be deployed in the business. In this activity, you will...

Organizing use cases and usage scenarios represents a necessary process of eliminating redundancies in large amounts of information. Analysis is an iterative process in which you gradually create structure in the information provided by different sources of information. In this activity, you will group the use cases you created in Module 5 by actors and actions. Then you will eliminate redundancies in both sets of use cases. Finally, you will review the usage scenarios to determine if there are task sequences that should be consolidated as usage scenarios under a new use case. ...

Usage scenarios help you to determine the tasks that make up a use case. You can use them to determine your understanding of processes within the business. Gaps in a usage scenario indicate information that you will need to gather to document the current state. In this activity, you will develop usage scenarios for six of the use cases that you identified in Activity 5.2.

To understand a process, you can create use cases that describe all of the interactions of the actors with a system. In this activity, you will create use cases for the timesheet process involving the administrative assistants and the consultants at Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. You will use the results of this activity in Activity 5.3.

In this activity, you will compare your experience in a development project with the process described in this section. You will also review the results of your work from the activities in Module 4 as they relate to business and user requirements and wants.

In this activity you will use the concepts and skills learned in Modules 2–4 to summarize the information in the Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. case study. In this activity, you will develop a strategy to gather information on the business challenge and vision statement. You will also summarize the information available in the case study. Finally, you will have an opportunity to interview a long-term employee of Ferguson and Bardell, Inc.

Each information-gathering technique has its own advantages and disadvantages. You need to choose the technique that would be most effective for the project and the organization. In this activity, you will look at two different scenarios and choose the information-gathering techniques for each. In this activity, you will review the case study and determine which information-gathering techniques are appropriate and what information you intend to collect with each technique.

This activity will provide you with an opportunity to think about the business challenge from the business and user perspectives. In this activity, you will look at the description of the current status of time keeping and billing for Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. and describe the information available from business and user perspectives.

You deal with information on a daily basis at work and at home. Most likely, you turn to specific sources for different types of information. This section provides a simple framework for looking at sources of information within a business. As you complete the activity, reflect on the sources you use at work. As a class, you will generate examples of sources of information that you would investigate for the Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. case study.

Use this activity to develop the skill of breaking down and assigning information into categories. By breaking information into categories, you can look at it critically to determine what required information is missing or incomplete. In this activity, you will work in small groups to analyze the Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. case study and to find examples of a particular category.

The business challenge and the vision statement provide direction for gathering and analyzing business requirements. You will develop both the business challenge and the vision statement to help guide you through the remaining activities in this course. In this activity, you will participate in small groups to identify the business challenge for Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. Then the entire class will compare business challenges and develop a common business challenge that all of the groups will use in class for the rest of the course....

As you progress through the activities in this course, you will identify a set of business processes that you will analyze in detail. For this activity, you will identify the broad set of business processes that are part of Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. In this activity you will review the Ferguson and Bardell, Inc. case study for the first time. Then you will analyze the case study to identify business processes.

This section summarized the steps that you will use in this course to gather, analyze, and present business requirements. You will learn more about each step in the process in the modules that follow. Before continuing, it is important to make sure that you understand the general process and deliverables in each step. By understanding the general process now, you will be able to put the concepts and skills you learn in each module in context as you learn them. In this activity, you will compare your experience in a development project with the process described in this section. ...

The process of gathering, analyzing, and presenting requirements is a detailed type of problem solving. You regularly apply problem-solving skills at work and in everyday life. This activity provides an opportunity to assess the problem-solving skills you currently possess as tools that you can apply in this course. In this activity, you will design a new type of motorcycle that you want to market commercially.