I would argue against the use of the ticketing system for managing your
use cases for a few reasons, which you may or may not find applicable:

a.)    Managing  the use cases in the same system as
defects/enhancements/tasks breaks a task oriented ticket approach

b.)    It is possible that you may have multiple variants of a use case
for minor modifications to baselines, which would be painful to
duplicate in ticket form

c.)     Re-use of use cases for a similar program/project would probably
require re-creating the ticket again, or making two tickets that are
very similar

 

The first item is probably the most important for development; it is
typically more useful/productive to try to enter tickets in some
task-oriented manner. The overall goal is then to have 0 non-resolved
tickets.

The next two are pretty much along the same vein, and affect those
defining your requirements(if you have separate . It is far easier and
quicker to copy/paste/modify a wiki or a document than it is a ticket.
If you do this only a few times it is not a particular issue, but grows
very tiresome. (On the flip side, if you have to change systems, all of
your data is neatly packaged, and isn't too bad to migrate)

 

I guess the better question at the moment is how you currently manage
your requirements or requirements mapping. Typically you have a
requirement UID, which maps to one or more use case UIDs, which are then
referenced by one or more tasks. That would be an ideal scenario, but
what level of detail or granularity you have can definitely vary by the
industry you are in, and the project you are working on.

 

We will typically have a separate use case document(if they are
generated), and reference the use case #s in tickets(implement x-y of
#13123). An excel document maps test cases UIDs to use case UIDs to
requirements UIDs which map to customer requirements.  If use cases are
considered necessary for the scope, mapping to requirements occurs.

 

As it sounds, it's a fairly labor-intensive process (and painful) to
initially set up; much less so to maintain. I'd love to find some better
way of doing it which doesn't require buying a 10k USD solution or
having me manually move all the information currently entered in this
form.

 

What may be a feasible approach would be to create another Trac
environment specifically for use cases, and then use the InterTrac
interface to correlate tickets to particular use cases. That way you can
have your task-based system and your data-based system working side by
side. 

 

Hmm. I may have to start playing around with that some here.

 

HTH, it gave me some benefits! :D

 

 

James Guyton (JGU)

From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Dave Peacock
Sent: Monday, November 19, 2007 1:29 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Trac] use cases

 

Hi all-

Just exploring & evaluating Trac now. Looks nice, there are some great
features -- but what i'd really like to do is track use cases.

Have seen one suggestion of using the tags plugin, this is not quite
what i am after. 

Have seen a couple of examples out there of using the wiki for this, eg
add UseCases and then go edit that UseCases and add UseCaseFirstOne and
UseCaseSecondOne to that etc. Can easily link tickets to use cases and
vice versa this way -- which is important. I haven't explored templates,
i would guess you could set these up so person entering the use case can
easily follow conventions. That's important too -- i'd like the people
who are entering the use cases to follow the structure required for the
use case but not have to pay attention to the wiki structure or have to
know too much about the conventions. 

Formal use cases have well-defined fields, and in my mind entering a new
use case would be similar to entering a new ticket. There are some
fields to enter, and these are kept in a proper database. But is this
overkill? It solves the problem of having the person entering the use
case having to know anything about convention or structure, but maybe it
introduces too much complexity? 

Interested in hearing thoughts from the group. How have you dealt with
use cases? Did you use the wiki as above or some other bit of software
(and if so do you link into trac), or do you just informally send these
via emails, or something else? How is your solution working out for you?



thanks in advance
dave peacock




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