User Stories and Use Cases

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User Stories are one of the key agile artifacts for helping implementation teams deliver the most important capabilities first. They differ from use cases in some important ways, but share more commonalities than you might think.

Use Case To Actor Mapping

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We know the importance of identifying the use cases that enable our business goals. We also know the value of understanding the actors that will use our products. This article shows how to demonstrate a simple but powerful view that maps the use cases to the actors.

Avoid the Abilene Paradox

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An excellent article by Jonathan Babcock raises a thought provoking idea. When gathering requirements, we can end up with requirements that no one actually wants, because everyone thought someone else wanted it. This is apparently known as the Abilene Paradox, a term coined by Jerry Harvey. We can apply our […]

Elastic Users, Actors, and Roles

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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 […]