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Subject:Re: Plain English explanation of use cases?? From:Marilynne Smith <marilyns -at- qualcomm -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 21 Jan 2000 17:15:17 -0800
I may botch this explanation, but here is what I experienced.
Company A wants to build a new computer system that will satisfy the needs of
its customers.
Company A holds meetings with customers and asks:
What tasks do you do?
How do you do this task now?
How do you think this task could be done better?
How does your task related to other tasks? What information feeds to
you? What information do you feed to others? What sort of processing needs to
be done with your task? Are there any reports, etc. connected to this task?
Etc.
This information is used to develop the Use Cases. Each task or sub task has a
Use Case that explains what the task is, how it should function (at user
level), what reports are generated, and what the relationships are to other
tasks.
The meetings also discuss how the new system could work. There is a lot of
interchange in these meetings. They continue until the company has a good idea
of what is needed. What you end up with is a kind of computer system on
paper. You know what you want the system to do, but it's all on paper, you
don't have the electronics.
System developers use the Use Cases to build a kind of tree of functions.
After holding many of these meetings and developing the Use Cases, Company A
asks its developers to develop a system that will support these tasks. As they
begin to develop the system, they use computer modeling to show what appears to
be a working system. They ask the customers: Would this work for you?
Eventually they build the system itself.
Does this help? The Use Case development I was involved in projected an
Object-Oriented environment.
Marilynne
At 03:10 AM 1/21/00 , Jean Weber wrote:
>Can someone direct me to a plain English explanation of "use cases" and
>"user scenarios" as used in designing, programming and documenting software
>applications?
