I recently wrote about one of my favorite RML® models, the Display Action Response (DAR) model. This model has been on my mind a lot and I do hope it finds its way into every Business Analyst’s tool set.

One of the neat things about DAR models is that you can often get a lot of reuse out of them from project to project. They are meant to capture detailed requirements about your User Interface (UI), but you will find, many UIs have similar elements on them, even if they are completely different kinds of applications. For example, almost every system in IT has a login screen, which inherently has some basic elements in common like username, password, and a login button. Even if they are not precise, you can start with your basic copy from another project and tweak it for your current one.

I needed to create DAR models for an ecommerce site and I remembered that back in 2003 I did exactly that. So I pulled out my old requirements and did a copy and paste. On the first system screen I covered, there were 8 elements, and 7 of those were copied from the old software requirement specification! Sure, I had to tweak them a little bit because the phrasing was different on the elements and there were subtle changes in behavior, but overall I saved myself a lot of work.

There are other types of models you can re-use between projects, such as use cases or user stories, business data diagrams (BDDs), states diagrams, and state trees. DARs are one of my favorites re-use candidates because they can save you significant rework and reduce the risk of you forgetting some UI requirements because your old copies trigger you to remember.