Writing Effective Use Cases

Rating:
Summary: A good book, but lacks a little perspective
Review: I like this book. It's from "the man" himself. It shows how flexible use cases can be; it demonstrates many different styles and uses for them. Unfortunately I think it doesn't really tie use cases into the larger picture, such as their place as *one step* in a good requirements modeling process, or the fact that you can generate test cases from use cases very easily.

It goes a little far with silly icons of waves and kites and so on, too. Sometimes you get the feeling that he is really in love with his invention and has lost perspective on its place in the grand scheme of things: just one (vital, of course) piece in the puzzle.

That said, by all means buy the book. You will read about use cases in many books, but this one will show you many different ways to write them -- many styles, many ways to make them effective for different needs. Other books place them as one step in "My E-Z-Omatic software process (tm)" and that's too specific to really help you leverage use cases for your unique needs.

Rating:
Summary: The best book on use cases
Review: I read this book some months ago now, and I still feel that it is the best book on use cases that was evre written. It perfectly removes the illusion that use cases are just diagrams with ellipses. They are stories and the culture of structured story telling is taught in an excelent way by Alistair.

I used this book to teach object oriented analysis to novices and they produced outstanding results. The book helps a lot, when focusing the analysis and aligning the use cases on the right level of abstraction.

Rating:
Summary: made ME look like 5 stars at work
Review: I used the material in this book to define requirements for quality of delivered use cases, and then develop the use cases for a fully functional ecommerce and marketing site. I looked like a star when the job was done- it was one of the few efforts on this project that was recognized by everyone as being competent...

Rating:
Summary: Good for Requirements Gathering; read 2 times to understand.
Review: I'm a project manager and have given less than 5 stars because the book seems to have been written in a hurry. There are points which perhaps should be highlighted more, eg what steps should be included in Use Cases, or are we concerned only with messages passing between actors or is there more to it? I had to refer back to previous sections a number of times to fully appreciate the real message of Use Cases.

This is a good book, also suitable for beginners. Personally I'd like to see more examples (summary level) for web projects, e-commerce and anything new.

This book has made me understand Use Cases and their purpose, it has a number of useful suggestions on their application and implementation problems/politics. There should be more on how to use/link Use Cases with the 'complete' systems/business requirements documents.

I will use this book as my reference when judging other people's understanding of Use Case concepts.

Arde
MS, PhD
UK

Rating:
Summary: The power of providing real-world examples
Review: If there's one book that can be credited with popularizing use cases, this is it. Alistair Cockburn shares his applied knowledge in 'Writing Effective Use Cases' and does so in a very digestible format. This is a handbook, a self-study guide - one full of real-world examples and exercises (with solutions even!) that any analyst or designer can relate to.

Use cases are a form of documenting systems requirements and behavioral design specifications. Written well, they offer benefits to all who participate in the development life cycle. This includes analysts, designers, project managers, developers, testers and even end users. Mr. Cockburn's book takes the reader through the writing process, highlighting both good and bad examples. He makes no claims that any of these examples are perfect. And that is perhaps the greatest element of his book. Commit yourself to read through all the examples. By the time you're finished studying them, you will find your own skills in identifying what makes a 'good' or 'bad' use case have been sharply honed.

Perhaps the one area this book does not explore in enough detail is the translation of documented use cases into user interface designs. Mr. Cockburn defers to 'Software for Use' (another great book) for this. Even so, I would like to have seen some screen shots and comments about the user interfaces that were created from the examples provided. It would have helped tie the whole picture together. Translating use cases to highly usable interfaces is as much an art as it is a science. I believe this element of use-case driven development is best communicated in a live, face-to-face format. That's why organizations like Classic Systems offer workshops on this topic. As an instructor who teaches use case-driven development, I have found 'Writing Effective Use Cases' to be invaluable reference tool. Having tried out a number of Mr. Cockburn's ideas in the classroom, student feedback and learning results have shown me just how potent a learning tool this book can be.

Many designers and developers will tell you they are writing use cases; upon closer inspection, we find very few are writing them well. A poorly written use case can actually cost, rather than save, a project time and money. If your looking for a book that will help you and your team harness the benefits of use cases, this one is a good as it gets.

Rating:
Summary: The only book you need on use cases
Review: It's about time somebody wrote a good book about use cases. Cockburn provides excellent advice based on years of experience in the trenches. We're implementing the RUP in my company and this book was a useful resource for our analysts.

Rating:
Summary: Will change the way you approach processes and requirements
Review: My background is not software engineering - it's service delivery and process development. I got this book on a strong recommendation from my mentor because one of my techniques, information mapping, has some gaps when it comes to portraying processes. I had heard of use cases before getting the book, but paid little attention to them.

Mr. Cockburn gives one of the most sensible, logical approaches to capturing, validating and modeling requirements I have ever come across. My initial concern that this book was focused on software requirements was assuaged by the numerous case studies that address processes and policies. This is the heart of what I do, and the book gave complete coverage of it. Of course software engineering-specific material is also addressed since this discipline has the biggest audience.

The sections from which I got the most knowledge are: setting scope for the use cases and the way to use a hierarchy of use cases to depict increasing levels of detail, business process modeling, and the tips for writing use cases. This material pointed me in the right direction for resolving some of the shortcomings inherent in information mapping, and also gave me some fresh ideas on how to effectively and clearly develop processes that are traceable to requirements.

One of the things I liked most about the book is its fast pace and reasonable page count. There is no fluff, and at approximately 300 pages it is an easy read for someone on a busy schedule.

My personal opinion is that this book should be promoted to a much wider audience than software engineering - the approach and techniques will certainly serve the software engineering community well, but are also practices that business analysts, process engineers and others in IT can effectively employ. This one goes in that special section of by library that is reserved for books to which I frequently refer.

Rating:
Summary: A book wrote from an experienced point of view
Review: Not a book for novice people, but for people with some backgroud on use cases and looking for good practical form of exploitting this technic.
Many examples of real use cases.
It's not a lost of time.

Rating:
Summary: Improve your requirements gathering/specification process
Review: Requirements gathering/specification process is one of the most critical activities in any proyect endeavour. It is too easy to forget important things while you waste your time on not so important functionality or other attributes of the product or service being built.

Requirements gathering it is no more but not least than a bidirectional communication channel between developers and the customer, the users, or other stakeholders. Successful communication of your understanding on what are the needs, requires to use techniques easy mastered by both communicating parties. Use cases are one of such techniques, centered around the concept that users interact with the system in order to fulfill some concrete objectives.

Alistair Cockburn's book teach you what a use case really is or has to be(beyond any graphical notation used), and how to write them so that developers and users share a common understanding of the functionality required. In my development experience I've tried some different techniques for gathering and specifying requirements and I've found that the graphical notation of use cases (like UML) is difficult to grasp on the user side without any training (specially if your users are folks used to structured analysis notations). I've found also that the approach provided by Mr. Cockburn eases the communication among the different stakeholders so the number of misunderstandings be reduced to a minimum.

If you are involved in specifying a system, a process or almost whatever thing with an inherent functionality you must try this methodology and, undoubtly buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: Bring Your Whole Family Into The Requirements Process
Review: Suppose you have a team of new people, quite technical, but none practiced in developing software requirements. You need something to formalize the process. Somewhat bewildered by all of the UML and other modeling methods that are available, you decide that use cases are easy to understand, the methodology quite easily learned and particularly applicable to the workflow application that you have to design. You've got the Jacobson early books but need something that you can hand out and say, "This is our standard for use cases. We start next week on getting our software requirements done formally."

That's what I did. Bought one copy for myself. Got through the 270 well-written pages quickly and quickly ordered a copy for the other three members of the team.

The use-case methodology outlined is text-based with only the simplest graphics. If you like the more graphical methodology for use cases found in UML standard, you won't adopt this book as your company standard but will still gain valuable insight in use case analysis. At least pass it on to the business guys on the team so they have some clue on how to think about requirements.