Archive of Use Cases Articles
July 23rd, 2007

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?
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Posted in Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Use Cases | No Comments »
June 27th, 2007

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.
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Posted in Agile, Product Management, Project Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases | 2 Comments »
May 23rd, 2007

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.
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Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases | No Comments »
April 25th, 2007

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.
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Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Requirements gathering, Software development, Software requirements specification, UML Modeling, Use Cases | 4 Comments »
April 25th, 2007

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.
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Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases | 2 Comments »
April 24th, 2007

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.
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Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases | 9 Comments »
April 23rd, 2007

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.
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Posted in Agile, Agile Project: Ratings, Business Analysis, Product Management, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Use Cases | 7 Comments »
April 12th, 2007

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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Posted in Business Analysis, Requirements, Requirements Models, Software development, Testing, Use Cases | No Comments »
April 10th, 2007

It is easy to mix up the definitions of use case and use case scenario. A use case represents the actions that are required to enable or abandon a goal. A use case has multiple “paths” that can be taken by any user at any one time. A use case scenario is a single path through the use case. This article provides an example use case and some diagrams to help visualize the concept.
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Posted in Requirements, Requirements Models, Use Cases | 4 Comments »