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AGILE USE CASES ARE EVERYWHERE,  IMPACTING EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING THEY DO

Agile Use Cases are Everywhere  –  Used in all domains such as industrial internet, self-driving cars, and cloud computing.

Impacting Everyone – A common language unifying clients, development and operations, partners, sales, marketing and support.

And Everything They Do – Driving and coordinating the work across all disciplines, and across business, systems, hardware and software.  

WHAT USERS ARE SAYING ABOUT USE-CASE 2.0

"Using Use-Case 2.0 for agile projects seems to be an answer to the most important challenges we had on the specification and development side using the Scrum framework.” Jordi Reineman
Manager Analysis & Design
DUTCH RAILWAYS (NS)

“Agile use cases has turned out to be the perfect solution for my financial client for providing the business context, functional scope and just-in-time value-driven scenarios that fuel a prioritized backlog for agile delivery.” Bernie Clark
PRESIDENT OF SCIVIAN LLC

USE-CASE 2.0 - What is it?

Everything from User Stories but more!

Use cases is a well-proven technique for doing requirements and it has been part of the inspiration for more recent techniques such as user stories. Now the inspiration has flown in the other direction. Use-Case 2.0 is the new generation of use-case driven development – light, agile and lean – inspired by user stories, Scrum and Kanban.

Use-Case 2.0 has all the popular values from the past, not just supporting requirements but also architecture, design, test, operations, user experience, and also instrumental in business modeling and software reuse. In fact, the use case idea has become so widespread that the term ‘use case’ has become a normal English word used to understand the usages of virtually anything.

INTERVIEWS

Nicole de Swartz

Blueprint Systems

Dave Saboe

PAPERS, CASE STUDIES

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Use-Case 2.0 – The Hub of Software Development

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Keeping Development ‘On Track’ with Use-Case Slices at Dutch Railways

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Use-Cases and Scrum

Making the Most of Both

 

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Features or Use-Cases - which is right for you?

How to be value-driven and deliver value early-and-often

     

VALUE PROPOSITION

“The latest ideas, particular the concept of ‘slicing’ use cases, allows it to be used for small agile development teams producing applications. More importantly, Use-Case 2.0 seamlessly scales up to large projects producing the most complex of systems, which is where many teams struggle to use other agile requirements techniques like user stories. Use-Case 2.0 provides all the benefits of user stories with the ability to scale when necessary and easily see how all the requirements relate to each other across all kinds of systems – businesses, systems and software.”

THE TERM USE CASES IS UBIQUITOUS
"Thinking in terms of Use Cases is now widely adopted in all domains by all kinds of roles. Thus being able to work from use cases that are understandable for marketing, sales, and management at all levels, and then break them down into elements workable by agile teams (such as user stories) makes the work seamless throughout the lifecycle, improving communication and reducing the risks of misunderstandings."

Ivar Jacobson, the creator of use cases

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The Guide to Succeding with Use Cases

This guide describes how to apply use cases in an agile and scalable fashion. It builds on the current state of the art to present an evolution of the use-case technique that we call Use-Case 2.0. The goal is to provide you with a foundation to help you get the most out of your use cases; one that is not only applicable for small co-located agile teams but also large distributed teams, outsourcing, and complex multi-system developments. It presents the essentials of use-case driven development as an accessible and re-usable practice. It also provides an introduction to the idea of use cases and their application. It is deliberately kept lightweight. You will learn more about use cases by attending our e-learning course .

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DELIVERING CUSTOMER VALUE – ONE SLICE AT A TIME

Principles of Use-Case 2.0

Keep it simple by telling stories

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Ensure stories are captured to make them actionable and testable
Understand the big picture

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A use-case diagram is a simple way of presenting an overview of a system’s requirements
Focus on value

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Use-case narratives help focus on the value of the system
Build the system in slices

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Slices provide suitably sized work items and allow the system to evolve
Deliver the system in increments

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Each increment builds on the previous and adds new functionality or improves quality
Adapt to meet the team’s needs

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Different teams and different situations require different styles and different levels of detail

MASTERING USE-CASE 2.0 SOLVES MANY CHALLENGES

Getting agile Teams to Work
Getting Requirements Right
Getting the Right Product at the Right Time with the Right Quality

    Getting Agile Teams to Work

  • Wrestling with a big pile of technical stories but struggling to see the big picture?

    Never lose sight of the big picture with Use Case 2.0. The key goals of the system can always be seen as use cases on a visual diagram, while use-case narratives organise individual requirements. These small requirements can be expressed directly inside the use-case narrative or even as traditional user stories. Just zoom in to see the level of detail needed.

  • High number of tiny stories in the backlog and struggling to set priorities?

    Use cases collect together related requirements, potentially expressed as user stories, so that whole flows through the system can be understood. Slicing the use cases in ways meaningful to the stakeholders allows you to set priorities at the level you require, broad for longer-term release planning or thin slices for prioritising in the short term.

  • Finding it difficult to understand and manage a growing set of test assets?

    Well-written use cases provide insightful guidelines for the design of tests. The prioritised use-case slices also group together their related test cases which will be prepared before development begins on them. This facilitates test-driven development.

    Getting Requirements Right

  • Requirements requested and expressed by the client are not formulated in a language the development teams can run with?

    Users naturally express their requirements by telling stories which are captured within the structure of the use cases. These use cases are then sliced up and directly drive the work of the whole development team, ensuring the same natural expression of requirements is used all the way through.

  • Struggling to create and maintain easily accessible and lightweight documentation for support and maintenance of requirements for later releases?

    Use cases are structured around the real-world usage scenarios of the system so make it easier to relate them to support needs or for writing lightweight documentation. This use-case structure is easy to extend with new usage scenarios as the system evolves while having minimal impact on what has already been written.

  • Plagued with scope creep and no way to visualize the system boundary?

    A simple use-case diagram shows the goals of the system and makes explicit the system boundary with actors representing any users or external systems. Each individual requirement should fit within the scope of this big picture, typically within a use case. If it doesn’t, and it requires a new use case or a new actor, then it is potentially outside of the originally envisaged scope and should be questioned accordingly.

    Getting the Right Product at the Right Time with the Right Quality

  • Your client thinks and requests what they want a system to do by using use cases, but we actual implement from a pile of small requirements items or user stories?

    Use cases talk in the same language and structure as the client thinks and are exactly what the system provides. Working with the same language and structure as the client thinks, allows for better communication with less misunderstandings between all groups from beginning to end.

  • The product is released, but you don’t have something describing what the product can do?

    User Stories can often lead to a large number of fragments without the ability to see the overall capability of the released product. A use-case diagram however gives a quick view of the overall capabilities, while the use cases and their narratives describe what the product does.

  • Using user stories but they are not working as the system, teams or projects scale or become complex?

    To deal with issues of scale and complexity it is important to deal with different levels of abstraction. Use cases can be applied at many levels and across systems giving us the important end-to-end flows to focus on and test at all scales. This ensures all the detailed pieces built come together to deliver the overall goals.

  • Need a formal requirements spec for compliance/regulatory reasons but want to ensure you remain agile?

    With Use-Case 2.0 you have an auditable requirements specification throughout and at the end, rather than just a huge pile of story post-it’s in the garbage bin! To remain agile the use cases can be authored and built incrementally, slice by slice, adding detail where it is needed within the well-understood big picture.

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