Writing Effective Use Cases

ISBN 0201702258

AlistairCockburn's "nuts and bolts of writing use cases" book, with examples.

For XP freaks, there is a 1-page chapter on XP's user stories.

Thanks to all the people from around here who helped debug the book --AlistairCockburn

EricWoolhiser has written an Access 97 .mdb file that automates AlistairCockburn's well dressed Use Case template in chapter 11 of Writing Effective Use Cases. You can get this .mdb from EricWoolhiser or http://www.usecases.org

I bought this book for two reasons: 1) I was about to port a large subsystem, and figured I would need to reverse-engineer the user-level and component-level requirements; and 2) it had Alistair's name on it, and I'd read his stuff here on Wiki.

I found it very helpful in understanding what UseCases are about, what their limits are ("Mommy I Want to Go Home" will forever stick in my mind), and when to stop writing them. The sample use cases alone (both well-dressed and informal) are probably worth the price of the book in softcover.

Once I had the deeper understanding of use cases I gained from the book, I could concentrate on teasing out requirements from the existing system, instead of getting lost down the complementary ratholes of (on one hand) trying to document every last little detail of the system's behavior and (on the other hand) floating away on a thermal of speculation about the point of use cases, their Transcendent Meaning, and their relationship to other parts of the specification.

Executive summary: read this book, or if the bookstore closes before you finish, buy it and finish reading it at home. --GeorgePaci

Won the Jolt Productivity Book Award in 2001.

CategoryBook