Market requirements change. These changes impact the use cases that support the changing requirements. Functional requirements change. These changes impact the use cases that they support. How can we leverage use cases to manage these changes? And how can we manage changes to use cases?
Communicating A Release Schedule With Use Cases
We manage release schedules with project management. We manage customer expectations with consulting skills. How do we manage customer expectations about release schedules? With Use Cases. Background We started a series of posts exploring why we apply use cases as part of product management, identifying 8 goals for which use […]
Communicating Intent With Implementers
Giving a functional spec to developers and testers is not sufficient for creating great software. To a developer, a spec is only the what and not the why. And for a tester, the software requirements specification is neither. Use cases provide the why that explains the intent of the system for the implementation team.
Communicating Intent With Stakeholders
We can build a prototype of what the stakeholders don’t want, and then get feedback and fix it. Or we can review use cases of what we intend to build, confirm that each stakeholder wants it, and build it right the first time.
Four Assumptions of the Apocalypse
Business Analysts often start with four erroneous assumptions when eliciting requirements. 50% of errors in software projects are caused by requirements errors. These four faulty assumptions, presented by James A. Ward, can exacerbate the error-prone process of gathering requirements.
Verify Correct Requirements with Use Cases
The next piece in the puzzle of how and why we apply use cases to product management. Verification of requirement correctness.
Product Managers Play Tug-of-War
63% of product managers report to marketing and 24% report to development. 22% of requirements managers report to marketing with 55% in the development organization. These reporting structures can over-emphasize the needs of new users and super-users, while shortchanging the needs of the majority of users. Product managers will constantly be playing tug-of-war to get time to do the right thing.
Requirement Completeness Validation with Use Cases
In our article, The 8 Goals of Use Cases, the first goal is that our use cases must support requirement-completeness validation. In this article, we explore how to address this goal and how use cases can help. There are many pieces to this puzzle, and this article is one of them.
Extra Features Cause $245,000 Loss
Robin Lowry has posted a story of a demo gone horribly wrong at The Product Management View. In the story, users end up confused by the myriad of features of the software – resulting in a $5,000 sale instead of a $250,000 sale.