10 killer Guidelines for Writing Effective Use Cases

 

Duration:

 

1 day

Audience:

This workshop is of benefit to anyone who has previous experience with Use Cases and has tried to write Use Cases and has found it difficult, frustrating, and has not been satisfied with the results.

 

Pre-requisites:

It is recommended that the participants have previous working knowledge of Use Cases or have taken an introductory use case workshop.

Brief Description:

Learn 10 guidelines that address common use case problems and will help you write better use cases.

Description:

Use Cases are a wonderfully simple concept; describe a system’s functional requirements by telling stories about how that system delivers value to its users. Yet, for such a simple concept, good Use Cases are really hard to write. Existing use case authors frequently must deal with the difficult questions of:

  • How many use cases do I need?
  • How large should a use case be?
  • How should I structure the use case description?
  • How precise should I be?
  • How much detail should I express in the use case?
  • How do I document my details in a use case?
  • Why am I doing this in the first place?

These difficulties should not surprise us; good stories are hard to write. However just as there are guidelines for writing good stories, there are guidelines for writing good use cases. Your elusive search for finding a standard convention and language that can be used by everyone in the organization is over.

This workshop provides you with the fundamentals for writing effective use cases along with 10 practical guidelines to ensure their quality. Each guideline captures the experiences of use case practitioners writing practical real-world use cases.

Come hear Steve Adolph, co-author of “Patterns for Effective Use Cases” answer the above questions and join in with hundreds of others who have found the most effective way of creating use cases.

This is a reflective workshop and participants should be prepared to discuss and share their use case experiences. Participants are encouraged to offer feedback to their workshop colleagues and learn from each other use case experiences.

Target Audience

Advance Use Case writers

Course Level

Intermediate to Advance

Course Outline

  • Why do we create use cases?
  • What is so hard about writing good use cases?
  • Patterns
  • >Describing the properties of good examples
  • Pattern languages as diagnostic tools
  • Use Case pattern form
  • Ten Killer Guidelines
    • Adornments
    • Visible Boundary
    • User Valued Transactions
    • Complete Single Goal
    • Verb Phrase Name
    • cenarios Plus Fragments
    • Leveled Steps
    • Forward Progress
    • Actor Intent Accomplished
    • Ever Unfolding Story

Delivery Format

This seminar may be delivered either in-person or virtually. This workshop uses a variety learning methods, including lecture, question and answer, and group assignments.