Designing Bots

Chapter 15. Use Case Definition and Exploration

Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

—HENRY PETROSKI

CHRIS MESSINA REALLY WANTS to take a vacation to Cancun with his family. Chris works as a DevOps manager in a midsize company in San Francisco. His partner in life has already bought the tickets and booked the hotel, so Chris just has to complete two simple tasks: get approval from his manager, and find fun things to do during the vacation. Here is where our use case begins.

Our task is to build two bots that will help Chris take this vacation:

PTOBot

The PTO (paid time off) bot will help Chris secure his manager’s approval to take a vacation.

VacationBot

The vacation bot will help Chris find fun things to do while in Cancun.

Both bots are provided by PTO-IT, which is a leading software provider in the field. Both bots share the same infrastructure and will provide Chris with a state-of-the-art seamless experience wherever he is.

The marketing and product departments of PTO-IT have done their research, and have come up with the following insights regarding the bots:

Audience

Adults aged ~25–55, tech-savvy, tend to shop online, early adopters.

Business model

PTOBot will be an extension of the paid service already provided by PTO-IT, a widely distributed solution with high-tech companies. VacationBot will be a new experiment of PTO-IT in an effort to venture into the consumer landscape and generate revenue from referral fees.

Features

The marketing department ...