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Loading... Writing Effective Use Casesby Alistair Cockburn
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  celephicus | Mar 15, 2008 |  After reviewing every book I could find on use cases, this is the one that is making it into the office library. Part 1 addresses the different kinds of use case templates and the parts of those templates. Part 2 is a collection of topics related to use cases (including relating use cases to other types of requirements). Part 3 is an executive summary, or a review of the entire book. The text was fun to read, but I expect I will get the most use from the downloadable Word template from the author's website and the list of pass/fail tests for the different template fields in the endpapers. (  ) greenstarfish | Oct 6, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0201702258, Paperback)Alistair Cockburn's Writing Effective Use Cases is an approachable, informative, and very intelligent treatment of an essential topic of software design. "Use cases" describe how "actors" interact with computer systems and are essential to software-modeling requirements. For anyone who designs software, this title offers some real insight into writing use cases that are clear and correct and lead to better and less costly software.The focus of this text is on use cases that are written, as opposed to modeled in UML. This book may change your mind about the advantages of writing step-by-step descriptions of the way users (or actors) interact with systems. Besides being an exceptionally clear writer, the author has plenty to say about what works and what doesn't when it comes to creating use cases. There are several standout bits of expertise on display here, including excellent techniques for finding the right "scope" for use cases. (The book uses a color scheme in which blue indicates a sea-level use case that's just right, while higher-level use cases are white, and overly detailed ones are indigo. Cockburn also provides notational symbols to document these levels of detail within a design.) This book contains numerous tips on the writing style for use cases and plenty of practical advice for managing projects that require a large number of use cases. One particular strength lies in the numerous actual use cases (many with impressive detail) that are borrowed from real-world projects, and demonstrate both good and bad practices. Even though the author expresses a preference for the format of use cases, he presents a variety of styles, including UML graphical versions. The explanation of how use cases fit into the rest of the software engineering process is especially good. The book concludes with several dozen concrete tips for writing better use cases. Software engineering books often get bogged down in theory. Not so in Writing Effective Use Cases, a slender volume with a practical focus, a concise presentation style, and something truly valuable to say. This book will benefit most anyone who designs software for a living. --Richard Dragan Topics covered: Introduction to use cases Requirements Usage narratives Actors and goals Stakeholders Graphical models for use cases Scope for use cases (enterprise-level through nuts-and-bolts use cases) Primary and supporting actors Goal levels: user goals, summary level, and subfunctions Preconditions, triggers, and guarantees Main success scenarios Extensions for describing failures (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (2)
How I wish that I had had rhis book. A slim little number, written in a casual style, reinforcing the idea that a casual use case is better than a formal one or no use case at all. It will still take time to write a set of use cases, but Cockburn (pronounced co-burn, please!) has made them all and provides lots of gentle guidance.
Use cases are not perfect, but they are lightweight, and you can start writing them in a few days with no more tools than a text editor, and they are an excellent way of flushing out requirements (