Monday, May 26, 2008
Usage Narratives aren’t really use cases – at least that is what I have been told by several Use Case authors. But they do have several of the Use Case benefits: They are from the user perspective, they show a scenario, they can uncover additional requirements, and they have a “happy path”. But I found them to be most useful in making technical team members put themselves in the shoes of the user: no technical terms, no “user” or “system” but real names of people and applications. So let me give you an example of a usage narrative describing the process of using my brand new iPhone to access the internet through Safari (true story).
…Gina was working extremely hard in her home office [my business partners may question the reality of this] when her 92 year old father walked in. Peter had an urgent need to find out where a particular bank was and their hours because the newspaper advertised they had the best CD rates for his retirement fund. Gina tried to get online quickly, but had problems with her internet connection on her new PC. So realizing she had called the cable company that morning to come out to fix the problem she decided to help her father out by pulling out her iPhone and see if she could connect that way. She touched her menu button and immediately the Safari icon showed up on the bottom of her desktop. When she touched the “Safari” icon it took her to the last search she did – checking a flight schedule while at the airport the other day. She touched the multi-page icon and then “New Page” to start a new search for her father. She realized that she could turn the iPhone so it could be more easily read in landscape (she didn’t have her reading glasses). Gina touched the search bar and it went to keyboard view. She quickly entered the banks name and touched the search engine icon on the bottom right corner. Success! She found the link to the bank and wrote down the information for her father…
Now if we were really using this usage narrative, what questions might it trigger to help uncover requirements? How might this help in understanding the various types of users? How might this usage narrative provide the reasons for using various product features? How about asking about response times (what does immediately mean)? How about thinking about the what-ifs – what if she timed out while waiting for the search and it went back to her password screen? Could it be used to show the current feature or the new and enhanced one?
So give it try. Next time you create a Use Case, “make it real” with a Usage Narrative. For more information, check out the book “Writing Effective Use Cases” by Alistair Cockburn.
Article written by: Gina Schwalm, PMP, CBAP, Business Analysis Curricula Practice Owner, TEKsystems Partner via Lighthouse Consulting Partners
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