Friday, October 16, 2009

Use Cases in an Agile Project

Use cases in an agile project? You bet, use cases are perfect to augment user stories as use cases can give more context to the person reading them. Use cases can also be used by the product owner to check for user story gaps in the product back log. Writing use cases often spawns alternative use case flows as new functionality is uncovered. As these alternative flows are written by the product owner new user stories should be written so that the functionality discovered in the use cases can be added to the product backlog.

However, the timing of when use cases are written is important. Let’s say your product backlog has 50 user stories, you would not write use cases for every user story. Only the high priority user stories are candidates for use cases. Writing use cases for low priority user stories in your product backlog just adds waste and overhead to your project.
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3 comments:

Term paper said...

It’s quite appreciable that such information is being shared through a huge network. Keep it up.

Unknown said...

For stories that are added to a Sprint backlog to be worked on we are currently producing use cases, domain model, sequence and class diagrams. Without use cases (which drive everything else) we would have no design docs...we'd have less overhead but less documentation too and all the negatives that go along with that. I come from a documentation-is-everything financial background so I've been brainwashed about this kind of thing...

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