Formateur : Alistair Cockburn, Humans and Technology, Inc.

Course Goal for Attendees

• Able to describe to others what a use case is, is good for, and ways of writing them.
• Able to collect and organize information about the users’ goals for the system, and to draft the functional requirements for a system.
• Knowing the limitations of use case requirements, as well as alternative writing forms. Learn the “habits of mind” of a good requirements analyst

The topics in the course include

• What is a use case? What does one look like? How are multiple use cases organized?
• How do use cases fit into the overall requirements process and requirements document?
• The four steps in writing a use case.
• Finding the boundaries of the system. (harder that it looks)
• Searching for actors and their goals. (trickier than it sounds)
• Establishing the scope and level of the use case. (crucial steps)
• Writing a simple scenario of usage, and analyzing it for completeness.
• Searching for exceptional and failure situations.
• Linking use cases.
• Layering use cases for larger systems.
• Protecting against technology change.
• Use cases and the new UML standard.
• Templates and tools for use cases.
• Making use cases easier to read.
• Common mistakes, subtle mistakes, mistakes with UML.
• Alternative writing styles, alternative formats, alternative tools.
• Exercises: We use two different domains for exercises.
• One is our choice, an easy topic everyone should be able to identify with.
• The second is one from your universe, so that the people in the class get to learn how to work with use cases as they will when they return to work.
• For each exercise, we shall write, then peer review the writing, and discuss the issues that came up in the writing.
• There are many aspects of writing use cases in a consistent way that bedevil the writer, and many ways of dealing with those difficulties. Each person will have a chance to develop their own preferences.

Note