My last post was about why Use Cases should still be considered alive and well as an analysis technique in Agile projects. That begs the question: if people can dismiss Use Cases as old fashioned and a waste of time, is there any place left for traditional Requirements documents? I am not a fan of Big Requirements Up-Front. Fat requirements documents based on the premise that if you don’t ask, you don’t get, tend to accumulate very long feature lists. Crafted early in a project, they risk becoming disconnected from what the front line users will actually use. We try to mitigate this risk by prioritizing the features. But anyone who has been through the exercise of separating a few hundred features into[…]
Category: Agile
A few weeks ago a discussion popped up on LinkedIn titled “Use Cases are old-fashioned and a waste of time and money“. Provocative, to be sure, the debate that followed (at last count 88 comments and building) was an entertaining romp through the personal biases of a number of experienced practitioners. There were two distinct camps. Arguing against use cases was a group that liked pictures better than words for displaying the sequence of events to fulfill a user goal. For them, taking the time to write use cases is an unnecessary formalism that is too slow to keep pace with the needs of an Agile team. On the other side was more reflective group who viewed use cases as just[…]
Life is messy. Those of us who work as business analysts see it in the myriad of ways in which people create, store and retrieve information in order to do their work. Called upon to help improve a situation, we often reach for help in the form of a methodology. The trouble with most system design methodologies is that they are made for giving structure to the process of building a solution, not for helping people living in a messy situation decide what would actually make things better. It is all too easy, particularly with larger projects, to get to design without fully understanding the context in which people will use the solution. What’s missing is an explicit way of[…]