A.1 Overview

We use the example of a real estate management system to illustrate the development of a full- sized system-requirements analysis. As with the other examples, we reduce the complexity to fit within the context of this book by ignoring some details and whole requirements, making the requirements presented here an illustration of the use case methodology without being, necessarily , a complete real estate management system. There are whole sets of requirements that are out of the scope of this book, including the accounting functionality that must underpin a system such as this.

As we present this analysis, we emphasize the changes that take place in our understanding of the system, as reflected by the use cases, and try to reduce the duplication usually visible when the results of an incremental process is displayed linearly in an appendix.

The basis of this system is this: an investor allocates a percentage of assets to real estate. In this case, he purchases or builds commercial real estate such as shopping malls and office buildings . These assets require management just like a portfolio of fixed income securities. To reduce the use of spreadsheets as the management tool, the investor requires a system to automate the recording and reporting on these investments. Specifically, the scope of this system should include the ability to track the capital allocations made and provisioned, the resulting cash flows for the property and the sources for these cash flows, and the ability to calculate the return on these investments.

Figure A.1. Initial Scope

Our first step is to think about the broad scope of this system.

We identified two use cases initially: "manage investments" and "report on investments." We also identified three actors: the operations manager, the property manager, and the external partner.

We worked with the key stakeholders to document the following high-level technical and functional requirements.