Like most businesses, your organization is probably looking for ways to expand your mobility capabilities, both internally and to your clients. Unfortunately, it might be tempting to jump straight into “solution” mode without first identifying, clarifying and organizing the related solution requirements.

A use case will capture important functional requirements and help to describe how a user will interact with a system to accomplish a specific goal. This functionality may include the functionality of another use case or possibly extend the functionality of a preexisting use case. When you think about mobility, these use cases and their relationships can become quite complex. Therefore, if you don’t take the time to model complex mobility capabilities with use cases, you might miss important details that will impact your ability to build a solution with the desired functionality.

When defining a use case, you’ll need to describe the following aspects:

• Scope: What exactly is this use case accomplishing? Clearly identify the specific functional requirements.
• Constraints: What are the pre-conditions that must be in place to enable this use case? Are there any specific post-conditions that must also be met once the use case has been executed?
• Derived requirements: What are the non-functional requirements (such as availability, security, performance and so on) that may be related to the use case and must be addressed in the technical solution?
• Actors: Who (or what) will interact with the system(s)?
• Main scenario: What is the sequence of steps that must be carried out to perform the use case?
• Successful outcome: What specific criteria must be met to ensure that the desired goal has been achieved?

Let’s use an example of mobile device management (MDM) to help illustrate how a use case can be employed to bring clarity to the related processes and activities.

MDM services provide mobile device–level controls to help address the full spectrum of infrastructure access and device, application and content management.

The IT team will be interested in using the MDM tools to enforce corporate policies on their users’ mobile devices. As an extension of that core device management capability, they may also look at managing applications and content, pushing out settings or configurations (such as a corporate WiFi profile) or possibly enforcing a containerization mechanism to separate business content from personal content in a bring your own device (BYOD) scenario.

Operations personnel will be most interested in monitoring the MDM environment, with access to reporting capabilities for system usage. This team will also be involved with identifying and remediating any policy violations that may occur.

Users, of course, will be interested in participating in the MDM program to access enterprise applications and other content.

By defining these use cases and identifying their relationships and actor interactions, you can gain a much clearer picture of the functional solution requirements. From there, you can now begin to extract the specific technology requirements and start to build the mobility solution.

Does your organization model mobility or other IT capabilities using use cases? Connect with me on Twitter @JustinNdreu to share your thoughts.

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