Enhancing shared understanding

When working with a problem where domain concepts are unclear, there is a need to arrive at a common understanding among key team members (both those that have bright ideas – the business/product people, and those that translate those ideas into working software – the software developers). For this process to be effective, we tend to look for approaches that are as follows:

• Quick, informal, and effective
• Collaborative – easy to learn and adopt for both non-technical and technical team members
• Pictorial, because a picture can be worth a thousand words
• Usable for both coarse-grained and fine-grained scenarios

There are several means to arrive at this shared understanding. The following are some of the commonly used approaches:

• UML
• BPMN
• Use cases
• User story mapping
• CRC models
• Data flow diagrams

These modeling techniques try to formalize knowledge and express it in the form...