The next piece in the puzzle of how and why we apply use cases to product management. Verification of requirement correctness.
Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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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.
Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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The Use Case For Creating Goal-Driven Use Cases
There are 8 reasons we write use cases. Most of the benefits of documenting use cases come from communication, but all of the benefits depend upon the initial creation of the use case. The first step to determining the best way to create the use case is to understand the use case of creating use cases.
Communication / Foundation series / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Foundation Series: How To Read a Formal Use Case
Use cases represent the activities that people do when interacting with a system to achieve their goals. Use cases are a very effective tool for communicating and documenting what a system is intended to accomplish. Formal use cases are use cases that use a specific structure to represent the information. Knowing how to read a formal use case is important.
Lists / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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The 8 Goals of Use Cases
Why do we write use cases? For the same reasons that our users use our software – to achieve a goal. In our case, we want to assure that we are creating the right software. By looking at this goal in more detail, we can make decisions that drive the best possible use case creation. Lets apply our product management skills to writing better use cases by writing an MRD for use cases
Product Management / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Use Cases
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Challenging Requirements
The hardest long term challenge in eliciting requirements is improving our ability to do it. The hardest short term challenge in gathering requirements is getting all of them. We have a lot of techniques for gathering requirements, from interviewing to brainstorming to researching. How do we know we defined all of the requirements? Everyone who manages requirements knows the value of validating requirements. But validation leaves a blind spot as it looks backwards instead of forwards. We propose to do exactly the opposite.
Process Improvement / Project Management / Software development / Use Cases
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Where Did You Get That Estimate?
How good are our estimates? We can use PERT to estimate the time it will take to implement each requirement. We can use timeboxes to schedule the requirements within each release. If we don’t know how good our estimates are, its an exercise in futility. Scheduling is about more than predicting the future, its about knowing how much faith to have in our predictions.
Communication / Consulting / Product Management / Requirements / Software development / Testing / Use Cases
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Communicate Relevant Quality Metrics
Most teams think about testing in terms of code coverage – what % of the lines of code are covered? What matters to our stakeholders is how well the software works. More precisely, how well does the software let the users work? We should be targeting our quality message in terms of use cases, because that matches their perspective and context.
Agile / Interaction design / Process Improvement / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements management software / Software development / Use Cases / UX
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Gartner research on Agile Requirements Definition and Management (RDM)
Gartner has a research report available for $95, titled Agile Requirements Definition and Management Will Benefit Application Development (report #G00126310 Apr 2005). The report is 7 pages long and makes an interesting read. Gartner makes a set of predictions for 2009 about requirements definition and management (RDM) systems, and the software created with RDM tools. Gartner misattributes several benefits of good process to RDM tools. We give them a 3.5/7 for their analysis – check out the details here.