Mentors assist in the final selection to ensure that cases chosen for analysis will shed light on the application problem the workshop will attack later. A student led discussion informally analyzes and identifies salient and novel features of what has been seen or read about. To the extent that a case deals explicitly with change, a more formal analysis will catalog the change issues, the enabling factors for change proficiency, and any readily available change-proficiency performance metrics. New cases that prove to be instructive are added to the library for future students to reuse. Typically the original designers of these existing systems employ techniques that they are unable to articulate to others sufficient for duplicating the expertise.
Students choose the subject for analysis from candidates suggested by mentors.
The fact that the subject may have been analyzed by previous workshops and already exists in the library as a case model is of no consequence - a new perspective may well result. Mentors provide process guidance, aiming the group toward the eventual descriptive requirements for consistent knowledge representation. Here is the crux of the workshop. The problem being attacked may well have been worked on by prior workshop groups who failed to gain an implementation recommendation. The workshop group is broken into small teams when possible in order to have multiple perspectives vie for group appreciation.