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Application Development and Use Cases - The Devil Is In The Details
October 16, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices
Application Development and Use Cases - The Devil Is In The Details
By Claudio Locicero
Advocating the building of use cases into systems design for an organization that prefers not to use them may be an uphill battle, but being able to provide qualitative reasoning to champion this best practice may provide the needed remedy to the organization’s inertia. The following points help drive home this best practice approach:
- Use cases help developers comprehend both the business of the user and the functional expectations of the systems.
- Utilizing use cases help developers and testers create test cases for comprehensive application testing by utilizing end user feedback.
- Use cases help developers keep the project requirements within scope by neither oversimplifying (leaving out functions required for actual usages), nor over-specifying the actual requirements (including functions that the users do not need or will not use).
- Use cases created early on in a project can be used to verify that requirements have not changed by verifying that they are still applicable for the system.
Involving end-business users to develop use cases is ideal since they are ones in the trenches and best understand their own requirements…much more so than their own management. You may find that end-business users will gladly accept the responsibility of providing input via an interview format into the development of applications that they will ultimately utilize. The application developers will need to learn to ask the right questions to receive pertinent information for the use case construction. Developing use cases take time and dedicated effort to ensure all possible scenarios are considered along with scenarios that can demonstrate alternative ways to accomplish the same objective.
The Agile development methodology supports the utilization of use cases because Agile techniques require close collaboration with the end users, but does not go into too much depth when creating the use case. Agile use case development basically consists of developing a quick synopsis of the requirements and then immediately proceeding to code. The overall objective of application development is to perform as quickly as possible by verifying the actual user requirements early and minimizing project scope creep.
Organizations, whether or not they use Agile development techniques, would benefit greatly by using case construction so as to properly develop user requirements and expectations without overcomplicating or oversimplifying the coding process.
Written by Claudio LoCicero, M.S.
Over his career he has held several technical and management positions both in the United States and overseas within the private and government sectors.
He holds a Master of Science in Information Technology with an Information Security Specialization from a university designated as a National Security Agency Certified Center of Academic Excellence for Information Assurance. He also holds numerous professional certifications such as the Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Information Security Manager (CISM), Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Foundation, along with several other professional certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, and the National Security Agency (NSA).
He is an active member of the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium (ISC2), Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), and the Project Management Institute (PMI).
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