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.
Agile / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Incremental Delivery and Evolving Use Cases
Amazon.com started by selling books. Their initial use case was “Sell books online.” The vision was always “Sell everything” – hence the name. But they started with a simple use case and evolved it.
Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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Subordinate and Superordinate Use Cases
Use Cases can be built up by combining other use cases. When a use case is made up of other use cases, the component use cases are known as subordinate use cases. The “parent” use case is referred to as the superordinate use case. This is known as composition. See an example of how composition works for use cases.
Communication / Design / Interaction design / Requirements Models / Use Cases / UX / Writing
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Use Case Driven Documentation
Yesterday we wrote about focusing our documentation on what our users are trying to accomplish. With a structured requirements approach, or with an interaction-design driven approach, we’ve already solved half the problem – determining what to document.
Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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The Impact of Change and Use Cases
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?
Communication / Consulting / Product Management / Project Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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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 […]
Communication / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Software requirements specification / Use Cases
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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.
Communication / Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / Use Cases
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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.
Product Management / Requirements / Requirements Models / ROI / Use Cases
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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.