Serena Prototype Composer 2009 R1 Review

Prototype Composer is a requirements visualisation and prototyping tool designed to simulate how applications will look and function before a developer writes any code, Serena said. With the Prototype Composer product, Serena is attempting to solve the problem of business users not always describing everything they want in an application, or being cryptic about it. Application prototyping makes it possible for project stakeholders to see how an application will look and

function before any code is ever written. With Serena Prototype Composer business users and analysts can

visually capture requirements as wireframes and enable end-users interact with the prototype as if it were the final application confirming requirements and suggesting changes in real time.

Best of all- it's completely free. Prototype Composer is designed for:

• Business Analysts
• Business Consultants
• Project Managers
• Product Managers
• User Experience Developers
• Product architects

The Prototype Composer user interface consists of four main regions:

1. the editor window that you use to view and edit models of processes, activities, interfaces, actions, decisions and activity data,
2. the navigation pane to select model items to edit,
3. menus and toolbars to provide access to modeling commands and options
4. task panes to provide tools and palettes to support your modeling activities.

Figure 1: user interface regions

Prototype Composer breaks the job of modeling application projects into a number of different tasks, each of which requires a different editor. So, Prototype Composer contains seven high level editors that are accessible through the navigation pane for editing the various aspects of a project:

Project - to collect general project information, to manage requirements and to create and publish documentation related to the project.

Process -to graphically define the process flows that make up the project. A process defines the relationship between business activities performed by different audiences to accomplish a business goal.

Activity- to graphically define the interactive, system or manual activity flows that comprise the business processes. An activity consists of a flow diagram that combines interface, decision, and action steps to describe the logic and functional behavior of an individual interaction or system task. After you have defined an activity, you can use Prototype Composer to simulate running the activity flow.

Interface -to graphically define user interface pages. An interface consists of a page containing a variety of visual elements such as images, buttons, text editors, and other controls.

Decision-to create steps that embody business rules. The process and activity editors use decision steps to make branching decisions that determine which steps are executed next in a flow.

Action- to define steps that perform calculate, communicate, and connect actions. For example, action steps in an activity may represent sending email, performing calculations, or connecting to systems-of-record.

Data- to view and edit the inputs, outputs and data underlying a selected activity.

The simulation feature lets you view each interface step, enter data and make decisions as you traverse the activity. Links in the underlying activity map are highlighted to show your progress. You can step forward and backward through the activity, set breakpoints, and watch decisions being made.

Simulation is not just a slide show of interface steps. Information you enter in interface steps is stored in the underlying activity data, used by decisions and displayed in downstream steps that map to those values. You can specify the data written by action steps, either individually by selecting a test set while simulating, or throughout the activity flow by specifying a scenario.

Serena come with excellent sample project called Qlarius Insurance Quotes, and if you take few hours to study it, the whole concept of Serena become easy to understand. In the next posts, I'm going to show how to create project in Prototype Composer.

Figure 2: running simulation