A look back at the best from this week in the past.
Use Case Management is a Tough Balancing Act
Learning how to write use cases can be tough, but it is simple compared to the balancing act of determining which use cases to write and how to manage the expectations of all the stakeholders that are involved. It can be a difficult balancing act to prioritize use cases to […]
Global Actor Hierarchies and Personas
We use actor hierarchies to organize the different users of a system. Different people play different roles, and thus do different jobs. We use different actors to identify and organize those people. When deploying a system globally, we usually discover people that do the same jobs, but do them differently. […]
Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-12-15]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
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 […]
Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-04-21]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Overdoing Personas
Its easy for us to overdo almost anything. Kim Goodwin offers some good advice about how not to overdo it when using personas as part of our software development process.
Actor Hierarchies And Then Some
Actor Hierarchies give us an overview of the people who will interact with the system. We can extend this model to provide a visual indication of how use cases are distributed through the organization. Further, we can leverage a hierarchy to show how use cases are rolled out to the users – a targeted communication for our stakeholders.
Requirements Gathering – Interviewing the Right People
How do we find out what someone wants when they don’t know what they want or what they can have? One of the best techniques for gathering requirements is to interview users. But which users?
Imagine aliens came to the planet and offered to solve our gasoline problem. How could we tell them what we wanted? We might say we wanted cars that run on clean renewable energy. The aliens might leave thinking “Oh well, I guess they didn’t want faster-than-light travel.”