sXc#24 - Spec Writing for Web-based Project Planning Working document: "Stakeholders of a Collaborative Project Planning System: Some thoughts on Actors and Roles to drive use cases and scenarios during analysis and specification writing" Document status: Working document, comments welcome. Draft author: Frank Castellucci Peer Reviewer: Richard Dice Sponsors: Opendesk.com and Collab.Net Project URL: http://sohodojo.com/techsig/project-planning-project.html Project ID: 24 Item: A working document to guide analysis and spec writing Format: Plain text File name: sxc24-stakeholders.txt =================== = Introduction = The goal of this working document is to identify Stakeholders of a Collaborative Project Planning system to drive use cases that help enumerate and elucidate system requirements through use case scenarios. Not all of the Stakeholders may be participating in everyones individual project requirements, but they all exist as potentials. It is in the best interest to consider all the domains of use. In that respect there are a number of base Stakeholders that (depending on your respective Software Development Life Cycle process standards) may be missing, if you feel that there is an important but overlooked Stakeholder please let us know! Something to consider: A single person may wear many hats on a project (chief cook and bottle washer), but keep in mind that the purpose of this post it to identify stakeholders by responsibility. So, for example, the tasks you perform as a Developer can be significantly different than those performed while wearing the Test hat. =================== = Project Stakeholders - "I'll take Actors and their Roles for $400, Alex" = A widely-shared and intuitive analysis of this problem domain suggests that 'Persons as Actors of Roles' will be central to an effective and flexible analysis and, eventually, a solution design in the problem domain of project planning and management. Here is a first-cut at capturing these abstratctions which will be used to structure our analysis and specification development: * Stakeholder - People effected by the system, and those with direct or indirect influence on the system requirements. * Role - A role characterizes the stakeholder in terms of responsibilities. A role can be people or other systems. * Actor - In the Universal Modeling Language (UML), an actor is a notational representation of the Role and are meant to capture Type or Class, not a object. Actor is depicted as a stick figure with a round head (my son comments I look just like one). Stakeholders for a Project Planning/Management System are a domain-specific collection of 'actable roles'. Candidates, including initial descriptions, are as follows: * actor User Documentation: A User is that which uses the system. There is no implication as to how they may use it. * actor Visitor Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::User Documentation: A visitor is a user of the system for reading, viewing, downloading, and possibly providing information in visitor accessable areas of the system. * actor Member Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::User Documentation: A Member is a user that formally belongs to a project and, as such, has access beyond visitor capability. * actor Business Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: Business represents the base role of involvement for various responsibilities related to the business aspect of a project. * actor Requirements Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: The central role of requirements is aimed at understanding the problem and how the proposed solutions will address it. * actor Architect Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: The central role of Architect is to create the architecture of the system, indentifying the large-grained components or sub-systems and their responsibilities. * actor Analysis Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: Works with the requirements and use case scenarios in creating a high level abstraction of the system. * actor Design Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: Central role in design is to provide underpinnings (diagrams, state, interaction) of the high level analysis. * actor Product Manager Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Business Documentation: The minimal role of Product Manager is the conduit between Business and other Member participants for the common goal. * actor Project Manager Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: The role of Project Manager is to manage the resources and stakeholders around the information towards the production of a projects deliverable (software, web pages, etc.). * actor Project Administrator Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: The role of Project Administrator is to administor team members, rights, project tools, and availability. * actor Developer Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: Central role of development is to implement the functional requirements. * actor Test Superclasses: Data::Use Case::Roles::Member Documentation: Central role is to test the respective domain aspects of a project. ### end of document, file 'sxc24-stakeholders.txt' ###