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Writing Effective Use Cases, by Alistair Cockburn
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Use cases provide a beneficial means of project planning because they clearly show how people will ultimately use the system being designed. This guide provides software developers with a nuts-and-bolts tutorial for writing use cases. It covers introductory, intermediate, and advanced concepts, and is suitable for all knowledge levels.
- Sales Rank: #145046 in Books
- Published on: 2000-10-15
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.20" h x 1.00" w x 7.40" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
Alistair Cockburn's Writing Effective Use Cases is an approachable, informative, and very intelligent treatment of an essential topic of software design. "Use cases" describe how "actors" interact with computer systems and are essential to software-modeling requirements. For anyone who designs software, this title offers some real insight into writing use cases that are clear and correct and lead to better and less costly software.
The focus of this text is on use cases that are written, as opposed to modeled in UML. This book may change your mind about the advantages of writing step-by-step descriptions of the way users (or actors) interact with systems. Besides being an exceptionally clear writer, the author has plenty to say about what works and what doesn't when it comes to creating use cases. There are several standout bits of expertise on display here, including excellent techniques for finding the right "scope" for use cases. (The book uses a color scheme in which blue indicates a sea-level use case that's just right, while higher-level use cases are white, and overly detailed ones are indigo. Cockburn also provides notational symbols to document these levels of detail within a design.)
This book contains numerous tips on the writing style for use cases and plenty of practical advice for managing projects that require a large number of use cases. One particular strength lies in the numerous actual use cases (many with impressive detail) that are borrowed from real-world projects, and demonstrate both good and bad practices. Even though the author expresses a preference for the format of use cases, he presents a variety of styles, including UML graphical versions. The explanation of how use cases fit into the rest of the software engineering process is especially good. The book concludes with several dozen concrete tips for writing better use cases.
Software engineering books often get bogged down in theory. Not so in Writing Effective Use Cases, a slender volume with a practical focus, a concise presentation style, and something truly valuable to say. This book will benefit most anyone who designs software for a living. --Richard Dragan
Topics covered:
- Introduction to use cases
- Requirements
- Usage narratives
- Actors and goals
- Stakeholders
- Graphical models for use cases
- Scope for use cases (enterprise-level through nuts-and-bolts use cases)
- Primary and supporting actors
- Goal levels: user goals, summary level, and subfunctions
- Preconditions, triggers, and guarantees
- Main success scenarios
- Extensions for describing failures
- Formats for use cases (including fully dressed one- and two-column formats)
- Use case templates for five common project types
- Managing use cases for large projects
- CRUD use cases
- Business-process modeling
- Missing requirements
- Moving from use cases to user-interface design
- Test cases
- eXtreme Programming (XP) and use cases
- Sample problem use cases
- Tips for writing use cases
- Use cases and UML diagrams
From the Back Cover
Writing use cases as a means of capturing the behavioral requirements of software systems and business processes is a practice that is quickly gaining popularity. Use cases provide a beneficial means of project planning because they clearly show how people will ultimately use the system being designed. On the surface, use cases appear to be a straightforward and simple concept. Faced with the task of writing a set of use cases, however, practitioners must ask: "How exactly am I supposed to write use cases?" Because use cases are essentially prose essays, this question is not easily answered, and as a result, the task can become formidable.
In Writing Effective Use Cases, object technology expert Alistair Cockburn presents an up-to-date, practical guide to use case writing. The author borrows from his extensive experience in this realm, and expands on the classic treatments of use cases to provide software developers with a "nuts-and-bolts" tutorial for writing use cases. The book thoroughly covers introductory, intermediate, and advanced concepts, and is, therefore, appropriate for all knowledge levels. Illustrative writing examples of both good and bad use cases reinforce the author's instructions. In addition, the book contains helpful learning exercises--with answers--to illuminate the most important points.
Highlights of the book include:
- A thorough discussion of the key elements of use cases--actors, stakeholders, design scope, scenarios, and more
- A use case style guide with action steps and suggested formats
- An extensive list of time-saving use case writing tips
- A helpful presentation of use case templates, with commentary on when and where they should be employed
- A proven methodology for taking advantage of use cases
With this book as your guide, you will learn the essential elements of use case writing, improve your use case writing skills, and be well on your way to employing use cases effectively for your next development project.
0201702258B04062001
About the Author
Alistair Cockburn is a recognized expert on use cases. He is consulting fellow at Humans and Technology, where he is responsible for helping clients succeed with object-oriented projects. He has more than twenty years of experience leading projects in hardware and software development in insurance, retail, and e-commerce companies and in large organizations such as the Central Bank of Norway and IBM.
0201702258AB07302002
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
There is still a lot of value in this classic use cases book even in 2017
By vrto
It's year 2017, software development went through major transformations, waterfall is (mostly) dead, RUP is dead, heavy UML is dead. Most of the companies now use some sort of agile-inspired technique to manage their software deliveries. Why on earth would anyone want to read a 17 year old book on use cases today? Well let me tell you something. It's good and it has a lot of value, that's why.
I've had a chance to work with use cases and specification of variable quality in my career. Some were much better than the other, but it really varied company-to-company. One common denominator (and sadly an annoying one) was inconsistency regarding naming, conventions, level of detail ... I can't stress enough how much development time I've wasted due to unclear definitions, missing specifications, and general confusion. The author of this book does a great job explaining how use cases fill in this missing piece by suggesting use case format and listing many, many real world examples.
You will read about important aspects of good use cases such as scope definition, which things are to be used in the use case, which things are to be designed as a result of the use case, and the importance of listing preconditions and postconditions. All of this is was demonstrated with great examples. There were things I didn't really like about the book and they seemed like an amusingly big hammer - especially all the little icons and colours trying to introduce some sort of visual framework to it. I'd rather not see any of that noise, but that's a personal preference.
By now use cases have a bit of bad reputation due to heavy-weight methodologies that were encouraged in the past. RUP. Waterfall. BPM. You name it. The author suggests that use cases don't need to be "fully dressed" - we can use different kinds of formal language for use cases. A banking analyst is most likely going to be required to "dress them up", while a startup product owner may come up with something much less formal and relaxed.
With hindsight we can ask ourselves a question. Is this still worth it? Do we still want use cases in young dynamic and fast changing environments like new tech startups? I do think that user stories or BDD are a better fit here. On the other hand we can't forget that there still are huge software companies running important aspects of our daily lives (banks, telco, transport etc.). These companies try to change as well, but it often results in some form of poorly implemented and conceptually broken agilefall process. While I don't really want to advocate for full-blown use cases, it made me stop and think plenty of times, and I am absolutely convinced that some businesses would massively profit from quality use cases.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Cockburn is a good teacher. Concepts are presented in multiple ways to ...
By Michael Lee
Very helpful. Cockburn is a good teacher. Concepts are presented in multiple ways to give you multiple chances to get it. As tech books go, this one is pretty "squishy." Which is exactly right. The fact that it's 20 years old isn't a problem. Cockburn is teaching a method for creating coherence and completeness in designing a system. Sure, he's focused on computer systems, but I'm starting to think about how this methodology applies to a business plan.
The most important idea in the book, for me, is about "levels." How to know when you're getting too airy-fairy and when you're getting bogged down in the details and when you're getting it just right. I had a project where the problem was I was all over the place on levels, and this straightened me right out.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Use Case Template
By Allen Carr Pitts
Being something of a UML (Unified Modeling Language) evangelist I took some exception to the basically prose approach to use cases offered in Mr. Cockburn's book. About half way through the book I looked at 'Appendix A, Uses Cases in UML' and was pretty upset about the authors relegation of diagrammatic use cases, as used in UML, to "a table of contents for the system". But I must admit by the time I finished "Writing Effective Use Cases" that I was beginning to agree that the prose narrative gave a plainer explanation of a system than a purely diagrammatic one. Indeed, even the diagram-based use case documents I have produced have references to prose explanations. Following Alistair's formula for text-based use cases called the "Writing Process" combined with UML diagrams actually produces a more thorough and specific set of requirements.
The prose-based use case approach actually exposes one of the real weaknesses of the UML diagrammatic approach. That is, that most business people do not know the implications of, or the differences between, the generalizes, extends and includes relationships in UML use cases so the use of these relationships in a diagram does not communicate anything in most cases and actually assumes that stakeholders know things about the system or process that they do not.
UML and use cases do not actually do anything themselves. They will not compile, execute, or analyze anything by themselves. UML diagrams and uses cases will do only one thing: Communicate about business processes. And since eighty or ninety per cent of all business processes have something to do with computers, specifically computer software, Mr. Cockburn's dissertation demonstrates an excellent way of communicating and analyzing business process to gather requirements for computer systems.
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