It is my experience that customers and developers are frequently solving the wrong problems at the beginning of a project. The more abstract artifacts and modelling structures we put in the way of getting down to trying some solutions out on some of the core stories, the longer it takes for the customers and the developers to cooperatively hone in on out what problems really should be solved.
Unfortunately, this is a premise that insults the intelligence of management, customers and developers, so it does not make very good marketing material. Nobody wants to hear that organizing the requirements better won't help because doing so just delays discovering which given requirements are irrelevant/misguided and which missing requirements are essential. The extra level of requirement structure can also increase the cost of changing the requirements. Maybe, extending stories that have been implemented and found to be useful by the customer into use cases would be a good way to generate new stories that are likely to have high customer value, but that should happen anyway without the formality of use cases. Steven Gordon http://sf.asu.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: Dan Rawsthorne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wed 12/29/2004 6:14 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: RE: SV: [XP] User Stories and 'the Big Picture' 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 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] 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/
