Abstract: A methodology for creating Unified Modeling Language (UML) use cases by decomposing a business process into one or more levels of focus areas. A top-level focus area defines the business process and a set of participants therein. The top-level focus area is decomposed by identifying divisible aspects or subsets of the business process, and by identifying the various roles played by the participants. The result of this decomposition is one or more sub-focus areas, each having associated therewith a set of participants based on the top-level participants. The focus areas and participants are recursively decomposed level-by-level until a set of bottom-level focus areas is obtained satisfying the condition that each participant has only one role. When this condition is met, the bottom-level focus areas may be modeled as UML business use cases and used to develop software that meets the specified business process.