RE: use cases - what are they good for

["Neumann, Eileen" <ENeuman -at- franklintempleton -dot- ca>]

Thanks to all who responded to my question on use cases. Food for thought. And the info on Personas is also interesting.

I am concluding that use cases are not going to be helpful in my particular documentation project. It seems that they are helpful in designing new products and agreeing on what the user goals are, as well as what features / procedures need to be developed and documented.

In my case, the procedures are firmly in place, and have been used for a while. They just haven't been documented yet. The questions that come up here involve how to structure the existing and agreed upon procedure in the documentation. It seems that use cases aren't going to help us do that. I don't see the value that they bring in this situation that basic flow charting couldn't deliver faster and more easily. 

I'd love to stand corrected on this though.

Thank you!

Eileen Neumann
Business Rules and Procedures




 -----Original Message-----
From: 	John Posada [mailto:jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com] 
Sent:	Tuesday, January 11, 2005 11:06 AM
To:	TECHWR-L
Subject:	Re: use cases - what are they good for


> Does anyone use 'use cases' to develop / write procedures? I've
> been investigating this topic, and it seems that use cases are very

I don't know if you are talking about the strict UML Use cases, or
use cases in the generic sense.

My expereince with use cases is that you don't include use cases in
your documentation. Instead, they are used to idendify what and how
you should write that documentation.

In other words...you identify a user and develop a set of use cases.
This set incompasses everything they do for their job. Each use case
is a discreet goal.  Include all of, but only the steps and processes
that they need to do this.

Examples:

- User needs to create user profile.
- User needs to update user profile.
- User needs to delete user profile.

Once you have everything they do accounted for, you create your
documentation and after you are done, your documentation will have
addressed everything they do.

> I'd like to know anyone's experience with use cases. Are they
> perhaps suited to IT only?

No...they are suitable for anything that requires documenting
something that someone does.

=====
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer



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