Is no longer current and has been superseded by

Working Effectively With Use Cases

Writing Effective Use Cases

The base course is the 2-day classroom WEUC course. The third day is a workshop in which the students work on their own projects with the instructor coaching them. The fourth day is done in the offices of the students, students working on their own projects, instructor rotating between them and assisting them. These additional days help to anchor the material in the students' work lives.

Duration:

Two-, three-, and four-day courses are available.

Level:

Beginner to Intermediate, all job titles

Location:

Taught on location, by request

Cost:

Cost for the 2-day WEUC base course is $9,500 plus travel for the first 10 people, $350 per person after that.

Each additional day is $2,500 plus the additional travel expenses.

Course cost includes a $50 value for each participant: a copy of the Jolt Productivity Award - winning book Writing Effective Use Cases.

Class Size:

The Instructor:

Each instructor is a senior designer and consultant, besides being an expert on use cases (none of the instructors is a "slide turner"), and can provide references on request. You will be pleased with the depth of expertise of your course instructor.

Contact:

Mary Anderson, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , phone 414-617-7073.

Course statement:

Working with sequenced exercises in small groups, and discussing the results with the class at large, this course provides attendees with both theory and practice in writing use cases for the requirements of a software system.

Audience:

Anyone who is faced with gathering the requirements for a software system. Typically from an IT department, but possibly from the human factors group, marketing department, or from a user community.

Course Goal for Attendees:

Able to describe to others what a use case is, is good for, and ways of writing them. Able to collect and organize information about the users' goals for the system, and to draft the functional requirements for a system. Knowing the limitations of use case requirements, as well as alternative writing forms. Learn the "habits of mind" of a good requirements analyst.

Course Topics:

Most people who take the course comment on how it is much more than "writing use cases." It challenges them to think through the what gets said by others and what they themselves mean -- to develop, as one person commented, good "habits of mind."

The course is based on continuous group exercises and discussions, rather than the slide-based lecture form frequently encountered in industry courses. In each section of the course a concept gets introduced, the groups do an exercise and discuss, and the entire room discusses their results. In this way, each person gets to participate in both exercises and discussions.

In the first day, we cover topics such as usage narratives, system scope, actors, goal levels, pre-and postconditions, and scenarios. In the second day we work through failure discovery, failure handling and sewing together use cases of different levels.

The topics in the course include:

What is a use case? What does one look like? How are multiple use cases organized? How do use cases fit into the overall requirements process and requirements document? The four steps in writing a use case. Finding the boundaries of the system. (harder that it looks) Searching for actors and their goals. (trickier than it sounds) Establishing the scope and level of the use case. (crucial steps) Writing a simple scenario of usage, and analyzing it for completeness. Searching for exceptional and failure situations. Linking use cases. Layering use cases for larger systems. Protecting against technology change. Use cases and the new UML standard. Templates and tools for use cases. Making use cases easier to read. Common mistakes, subtle mistakes, mistakes with UML. Alternative writing styles, alternative formats, alternative tools.

Exercises:

We use two different domains for exercises.

One is our choice, an easy topic everyone should be able to identify with. The second is one from your universe, so that the people in the class get to learn how to work with use cases as they will when they return to work. For each exercise, we shall write, then peer review the writing, and discuss the issues that came up in the writing. There are many aspects of writing use cases in a consistent way that bedevil the writer, and many ways of dealing with those difficulties. Each person will have a chance to develop their own preferences.

Equipment needed:

Paper and pen/pencil, flipcharts to hang group work output on the walls.

The 3rd / 4th day: A straight workshop. Some or all of the class attendees return, bringing with them the projects they are currently working on. The instructor becomes a coach and a resource for them, helping with the writing, answering advanced questions, tying up any loose ends, as need be.

Many companies find the third day particularly valuable, as the people anchor the skills learned in the two-day class and make rapid progress on their project, having the instructor/facilitator available to them the whole day.

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