Use cases are a good organizing principle for functional user stories. A use case is the collection of all paths/scenarios/threads that attempt to accomplish a single goal, and it is natural for each of the paths to be its own user story.
So, a use case can just be a name that acts as the organizing idea for a bunch of stories. I use the use case as the "bottom" of a function WBS that organizes work so that management can understand it (see http://www.netobjectives.com/resources/downloads/ManagingTheWork.pdf for a discussion of this concept. Now, the artifact we call a use case is a different thing. It has many forms, some of them more useful for deriving stories than others. The kind of use case analysis I do makes it easy to derive stories. See http://www.netobjectives.com/events/download/auc_0411_v8d_ppt.pdf for a seminar I delivered recently on the subject. Dan ;-) Dan Rawsthorne, PhD, Sr. Consultant www.netobjectives.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] office: 425-269-8628 Net Objectives' vision is effective software development without suffering. Our mission is to assist software development teams in accomplishing this through a combination of training and mentoring. -----Original Message----- From: William Wake [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 11:28 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: SV: [XP] User Stories and 'the Big Picture' On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 15:24:58 +0100, Mattias Vannerg�rd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mike Cohn and Martin Fowler seem to think that its good to take a Use > Case-approach and extract User Stories from it. I'm curious where you get this idea. I don't know what Martin Fowler thinks but I definitely didn't take this idea away from Mike's book. In general, you certainly don't need use cases with stories. The only time I've seen them combined is when someone said, "We've already written a bunch of use cases, but we want to move to a story-based approach. We'll write story cards that are the headline of the use cases." > Different people on this list do it differently, and all feel comfotable, and agile... Yes, but... you do want to understand just how an approach really is different. If you pigeonhole user stories as "things that will be use cases when they grow up" you'll miss important things about them. -- Bill Wake [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.xp123.com To Post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ad-free courtesy of objectmentor.com Yahoo! Groups Links ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________ To Post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe, send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ad-free courtesy of objectmentor.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
