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Model Essentials

Use models to facilitate communication and produce useful documentation

Use this practice to establish the appropriate style and type of models to drive the development activities.

This practice allows teams to:

  • communicate the requirements, structure and behavior of the system
  • view different perspectives of the system and understand how they are related to one another
  • employ the right models to meet their needs
  • be agile in their approach to modeling and documentation
  • focus on the essentials, avoiding modeling paralysis and the production of unnecessary documentation

 Things to Produce

This practice involves the production of a number of model related artifacts:

  • Key to effective modeling is establishing a lightweight set of modeling guidelines detailing how the models are related and how they should be used. These guidelines influence the application of the various models introduced by the other practices adopted by the project.

Key Competencies

This practice requires the team to be skilled in leadership, modeling and coaching.

This requires the following competencies to be in place:

This practice requires the team to have the coaching skills to establish modeling as a fundamental communications technique and to tune the modeling guidelines to ensure that the models truly benefit the team. Co-operation from all the other team members will be required but there is no specific level of competency required to be able to benefit from the models produced.

 Things to do

The practice starts by choosing the initial set of models to be used on the project as part of the project launch.

The team is then coached in the application of the models and standards selected. The results of the modeling work is then evaluated and the modeling practices continually improved.

Patterns and Guidelines

This practice comes with a large selection of proven modeling patterns to assist the team in rapidly establishing the right level of modeling to meet their needs and continuously improve their modeling skills.


 Patterns are also supplied for the modeling environment and the style and contents of the models themselves.