2. Moving to Use Cases
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
—HANNAH ARENDT
The computer industry has struggled to find a way to represent functionality to users. We have always tended to produce what we’re comfortable with: diagrams and specifications that are loaded with terminology and notation that looks a lot more like computer code than anything a user would understand. The traditional modes of expressing functionality to users early in the lifecycle are as follows:
• Requirements specifications
• Functional decompositions
• Data-flow diagrams (DFDs)
• Entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs)
• Prototypes
Typically, requirements are specified in lists and expressed in terms of “the system shall.” These lists ...
Get Use Cases: Requirements in Context, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
