Practical Use Cases

Overview

In this one-day course, we discover the nature of use cases and how to express them in such a way that, collectively, they provide a sound channel for expressing a business system's requirements to all parties involved in its journey from requirement to implementation.

Use Cases are increasingly becoming 'the' way to document the functional requirements of an enterprise – both at business and at system level. Essentially, they can be seen as an exercise in prose writing and, as such, can be undermined by ambiguity, incompleteness and unsuitable language. It is unlikely that any practitioner will ever produce the 'perfect' use case while under the sort of pressures we find on projects but it is important to understand what constitutes an effective one.

This course takes a highly practical approach to the challenge.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course, although a familiarity with the UML will be an advantage.

Objectives

Delegates will learn how to:

• explain the term 'Use Case'
• identify Use Case actors and their goals
• create an initial Use Case diagram to clarify scope
• elaborate Use Cases incrementally
• refactor Use Cases for de-duplication
• communicate requirements effectively
• ensure value is delivered throughout the process
  

Outline

Goals

• Use Case as a contract
• The importance of Use Cases
• Use Case levels

Precision and Accuracy

• Breadth before depth
• an approach to elaborating Use Cases
• actors and other stakeholders

Use Case Diagram

• Clarifying scope
• Clarifying requirements
• Effective communication and engagement
• Summary level diagrams
• User level diagrams
• Composition and decomposition
• UML

Naming Use Cases

• Verb-noun phrase
• Clarity of communication
• Use Cases and data
• Use Case Brief

Casual or Fully Dressed?

• Levels of detail
• Fitness for purpose
• Key information
• Pre- and post-conditions

Main Success Scenario

• Identifying and naming the happy path
• Simple steps
• Implementation agnostic language

Extensions

• Alternate and exception scenarios
• Failure conditions and failure handling
• Linking scenarios

Refactoring

• De-duplicating Use Cases
• Reuse of requirements
• UML stereotyped relationships
• Updating the diagram
• Iterating

Packaging the Use Cases

• Structuring the requirements document

QA reserves the right to improve the specification and format of its courses for the benefit of its customers without notice to the customer.