The goal of each Role is to contribute to (a part of) the requirements of the organization within which it is defined. The behavior of a Role is specified within a Role Plan. The goal of this activity is to conceive, for each role, a plan that could fulfill the part of the organismic requirements that have been delegated to the role under study. In this context a plan describes how a goal can be achieved; it is the description of how to combine interactions, external events, and Role Tasks in order to fulfill a (part of a) requirement. A Role Task is the specification of a parameterized behavior in form of a coordinated sequence of subordinate units (a Role Task can be composed of other Role Tasks).
The first task in this activity consists in detailing responsibilities assigned to
the currently designed role. For each role, a set of Role Tasks has to be identified
for accomplishing the assigned requirements. Roles interactions, that have been
already defined in previous activities, may prove useful in the definition of the plan
and at the same time they are constraints to be satisfied by the plan (the role has to
engage in the already identified interactions in order to exhibit a behavior that is
coherent with the scenarios it is involved in). The final step consists in determining
transitions between the various activities and the set of associated conditions. In a
second iteration each task will be examined to be eventually decomposed and in
order to determine if it requires something external to the role. If this is the case
then a new capacity will be created in the next activity and the role will refer to it.
The resulting work product is an UML activity diagram reporting one swim-lane
for each role. Activities of each role are positioned in its swim-lane and interactions
with other roles are depicted in form of signal events or object flows
corresponding to exchanged messages.
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Goal
At this step, each role behavior is detailed to conceive a plan that could fulfill the part of the organization requirements that have been delegated to the studied role under study. The plan includes a set of RoleTasks.
Input
Plans of roles behavior is deduced from the Scenario description and the results of organizations, roles and interactions identifications activities.
Output
Each role plan is described using an activity diagram, decomposed into two swim-lanes. The right most is dedicated to the role under study and it contains activities symbolizing RoleTasks (they constitute, together with their relationships, the actual plan of the studied role). The second (and left most) swim-lane contains activities representing Roletasks of other roles of the same organization that interact with the studied role. Each arrow crossing the line between the two swim-lanes corresponds to an interaction between the two associated roles. A third optional swim-lanes can appear during the refinement of the plan after the capacity identification activity. This lane contains all capacities required by the currently designed role, and relates them with the activity which uses it.
Work to be done
The previous activities describe the various interactions identified between all roles defined on a given organization. The goal is now to provide for each role a first description of a behavior able to fulfill a part of the requirements of its organization and corresponding to the previously described plan. Each lines crossing the dashed line between Designed Role and Other Roles swim-lane correspond to an interaction and thus should match one of the previously identified ones.
At this step, we focus on each role in order to define the plan that could accomplish
the requirements coming from the previous parts of the design on it. The first
task in this activity consist in detailing responsibilities assigned to the currently
designed role. Then for each of them, a set of RoleTasks able to fulfill it have to
identified. The final step consist in determining transitions between these various
activities and the set of associated conditions. In a second iteration each task will
be examined to eventually decompose it and determine if it requires something
external to the role itself. That will imply the creation of new capacities.
Methodological Guidelines
To conceive a global for an organization, the Interaction and role identification activity is the starting point. Each interaction previously identified should appear in the plan in the forms of flow or action-event crossing the partition. This aspect allow to check if the current plan effectively fulfills the scenario previously described.
