We all know the story about the emperor’s new clothes. I’ve been thinking about prioritization and scheduling, and as far as I know, no one is promoting that we maximize value – they (and we) have been promoting that we do the most valuable stuff first. Doing the most valuable things first does not result in getting value the fastest. In this article, we show why not.
Category Archives: Use Cases
Posted in Business Analysis, Expert systems, Prioritization, Product Management, Project Management, ROI, Requirements, Requirements Models, Use Cases
Tagged managing data, optimization, Prioritization, prioritizing use cases, time boxes, time boxing, timeboxes time-boxes, timeboxing, use cases, value maximization
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Elastic Users, Actors, and Roles
In About Face 2.0, Alan Cooper describes the elastic user as an ill-defined user who’s characteristics change to suit the needs of the developer – sometimes an expert and sometimes a novice. However, some of the otherwise good techniques for managing actors and use cases exacerbate this problem instead of alleviating it. How should we manage use cases while still getting the benefits of Cooper’s insight?
Use Case Example With Business Rules
In our ongoing exploration of how to meld the worlds of business rules and requirements, we look at an example use case and see how to extract the business rules.
Benefits of Agile Story Decomposition
When you plan a release, agile user stories, or classic use cases are the best sized pieces to use in the planning – from the perspective of your customers. Each user story can be further decomposed into a set of specifications, and those into development tasks. Development tasks are the right sized unit to manage your work breakdown structure – communicating the release schedule internally with your development team.
Posted in Agile, Product Management, Project Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases
Tagged managing data, managing releases, managing software releases, software release schedule, tasks, user stories, user story, user story break down, user story decomposition
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Nexus – Use Case Definition for Bundles
Yesterday, we identified the high priority goal for the third release of nexus to be supporting creation of bundles of articles. In this article, we will define the use cases we need to support.
APR: Mixing It Up With Design And Requirements
With a definition of the important use cases for our agile project, we can move to the logical next step – which is what exactly?
Prototyping.
Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Requirements gathering, Software development, Software requirements specification, UML Modeling, Use Cases
Tagged agile case study, agile project, agile requirements management, agile software development, Design, managing data, prototyping
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APR: Prioritizing Use Cases – Vote Three Times
In our agile project case study we defined corporate goals and user personas, and from our understanding created a list of use case names. We refined those use cases into use case briefs, filtering out some of the use cases (for the first revision) narrowing the list to six use cases. In this article, we propose a prioritization of those use cases and ask you to vote to share your thoughts.
Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases
Tagged agile case study, agile project, agile requirements management, agile software development, agile use cases, group think, managing data, prioritizing use cases, use case prioritization
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APR: Use Case Briefs
Each of the use cases defined as part of our use case names post is described at a high level of detail here. The goal is to get a broad view of the domain for our project so that we can focus on the most important elements. This is a key step in using use cases in an agile project. We need to understand enough of the big picture in order to determine what is actually the most important. Then we will work on the more important use cases.
Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases
Tagged agile case study, agile project, agile requirements management, agile software development, example use cases, managing data, sample use case examples, sample use cases, use case examples, use case samples
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APR: Use Case Names
In our agile programming case study, we have two corporate goals, but one of them (learn Ruby on Rails) only drives constraints, not requirements. The other goal is to make it easier for people to find and read great content in our niche. This makes the documentation of goal-driven use cases pretty straightforward. All of the use cases support this single goal.
With an understanding of the goals, the next step is to define the use case names.
Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases
Tagged agile case study, agile project, agile requirements management, agile software development, goal-driven use cases, managing data, supporting goals with use cases, use case name examples, use case names
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The Difference Between Use Cases and Test Cases
People who are new to software, requirements, or testing often ask “What’s the difference between a use case and a test case?” This article answers that question, by building on earlier articles about use cases and use case scenarios. At the soundbite level, each use case has one or more scenarios, and each use case scenario would lead to the creation of one or more test cases.
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