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Composer Product Tour

Serena Composer boasts a rich user interface that has a familiar office application look and feel, including a navigation pane on the left a task pane on the right, as well as menus and visual toolbars to provide access to key capabilities.

Define project team members and tasks, as well as provide access to requirements gathering and document publishing capabilities.

Visually model one or more business processes made up of a series of activities performed by the various stakeholders, including support for interactive, system and manual activities.

Model the key activities and interaction scenarios behind the business processes and visually reflect the requirements of your application.

In addition to modeling feature rich application user interfaces from scratch, you can also use Serena Composer's special Web Capture capability to import existing web pages into the modeling environment.

Once the models, prototypes and requirements definitions are complete they can be published to Serena RTM or Microsoft Visual Studio Team Systems. Serena RTM is Serena's full requirements and traceability management product.

Automatically generate requirements definition documents, functional specifications and similar documents directly from the application model leveraging user-defined Microsoft Word templates.

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      The main Composer Editor Window appears in the middle and automatically changes as you navigate or switch between modeling tasks.

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      The navigation pane provides quick access to each of the Composer visual editors. Collectively, the tabs in the navigation pane provide a visual taxonomy used for describing business applications:

      • PROJECT: Define your projects key information
      • PROCESS: Model business processes and activity relationships
      • ACTIVITY: Model your activity flows and interactions
      • INTERFACE: Design rich user experiences
      • DECISION: Define business decisions, rules and logic
      • ACTION: Define automated actions and business functions
      • DATA: Define the data being collected and managed
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      The Task Pane is a helper window that appears on the right-hand side of the screen to support the different modeling tasks you perform within Composer. It changes contextually as you switch between the different Composer editors, helping you accomplish that particular task.

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      Define all project-specific information such as project name, description, business owner, project manager, release number and schedule.

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      Integrate Composer with Serena RTM, TeamTrack and other ALM products.

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      Define roles and responsibilities for project team members.

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      Define a to-do list of outstanding tasks to be performed on this project.

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      Gain access to requirements gathering, document publishing and reviewing capabilities.

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      More than a simple diagram, business processes are modeled as high-level “touch points” that are familiar to business users. Activities can include:

      • Interactive – Web
      • Interactive – Smart Client
      • Interactive – Mobile
      • Interactive – Office
      • Manual
      • System
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      Flow lines and other steps are used to define the logical flow sequence between activities.

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      Business activities are placed in audience-specific horizontal bands or “swimlanes.”

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      Processes are defined by dragging and dropping steps from the task pane on the right to a process map representing the activity logic and behavior.

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      Activities are defined by dragging and dropping steps from the task pane to the flow map representing the activity logic and behavior.

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      Flow maps include Interface steps to present user interfaces, Connect steps that allow you to simulate integration with systems-of-record, and Decision steps that enable modeling of different experience paths in the flow based upon business rules.

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      Activities can be nested within one another, enabling modular design practices and greater reuse of activities within different projects.

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      Model either wireframe or graphically rich user interfaces within your project.

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      The task pane automatically updates to show a palette of UI controls and layout panels you can drag and drop onto your interface page.

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      Requirements definitions are denoted as being published to MS VSTS.

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      Requirements definitions are denoted as being published to Serena RTM.

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      Select from a list of available document templates based upon the type of document you need to generate.

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      Identify what part of the visual model you want to include in the published document.

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      Review the list of previously published documents and update as necessary.

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      Auto-generate the document in Microsoft Word and add your own content and boilerplate text.