Developing Requirements with Use Cases

Master the power of use cases for developing requirements, improving software quality, and solidifying the link between requirements and other aspects of system development.

This advanced course will build on your existing knowledge of the use case approach to give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for developing use cases, discovering other types of requirements, and documenting them expertly. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will equip you with the capability and confidence to improve your project outcomes through better requirements and use case development. You’ll gain a thorough understanding of common requirements and use case pitfalls and challenges, practical approaches for discovering and writing use cases and requirements, and strategies for applying the use case methodology throughout the project life cycle in your organization. If you already know the basics of use cases and you play a role in defining project scope, capturing requirements, or consuming them as a developer, tester, or technical business user, you can’t afford to miss this course.

It’s well documented that the most common source of delays, cancellations and defects in systems development projects is our failure to understand the project requirements. We also know that the top two causes of requirements errors are lack of input from the users and missing or incomplete requirements. As you’ll see in Developing Requirements with Use Cases, identifying and writing high-quality use cases is significantly enhanced with active user input and participation. In turn, that user involvement helps to ensure that all desired system functionality and behavior is explored and understood early on. This both drastically reduces the number of missed and misunderstood requirements and also provides a sound way to manage requirements on very complex systems.

Practical and realistic hands-on exercises and activities will allow you to refine and enhance your use case discovery and writing skills. Working in small groups, you and your peers will identify and discuss strategies and tactics that your organization should be using to better define project scope, discover requirements, and document and manage use cases.

To complement your learning experience, you’ll receive the groundbreaking book, Writing Effective Use Cases, by acclaimed expert Alistair Cockburn. This text supports the practical, real-world tone of the workshop and will make an excellent addition to any requirements engineering or business analysis reference library. You’ll also receive a comprehensive Participant Guide containing copies of all slides, supplemental material on specific tools and techniques, and a complete set of all workshop case project materials, plus an annotated bibliography to guide your further reading and learning after the workshop.

You will:

• Advance the knowledge you already have about use cases and their value throughout the development life cycle
• Implement practical methods for understanding user requirements
• Practice state-of-the-art business and system modeling techniques
• Understand the connection between functional system scope and use cases
• Identify the correct use cases for a new or enhanced business system quickly and accurately
• Develop and document correct functional requirements
• Gain exposure to relationships among use cases, Agile methods, and user stories
• Overcome common use case traps and pitfalls
• Explore interdependencies among use cases, other types of requirements, design elements, and test cases
• Increase testing effectiveness through well-written use cases
• Leverage the power of use cases to enhance software quality with improved traceability
• Apply use cases in your real organizational environment
• Improve your requirements elicitation skills
• Produce high-quality, readable use case documentation that serves business and IT stakeholders
• Experience powerful ways to document requirements with use cases

Who Should Attend:

• Software Test and QA Professionals
• Software Test and QA Managers
• Quality Analysts and Engineers

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