Cockburn & Associates

Cooperate to Win

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Duration:     1/2 Day, on location, usually in conjunction with consulting or other courses.

 

Description:   This course provides attendees with bothand practice in using and evaluating use cases describing the requirements of a software system. This is done by working exercises in small groups, and discussing the results with the class.

 

Audience:    This course is for anyone who uses or validates use cases prepared by others. These people are typically testers, technical writers, or from a user community,

Goal:   The attendees will 1) be able to describe to others what a use case is, and what it is good for; 2) be able to evaluate use cases for quality and completeness; and 3) know the limitations of use case requirements.

Cost:   $2,250 plus travel for the first 10 people, $100 per person after that.

·          Standard class size: 16 - 24 people.

·          Large class sizes: 36 - 50 people, larger only after careful discussion.

·          Course cost includes a copy of the Jolt Productivity Award - winning book Writing Effective Use Cases for each participant

For further information, contact mailto:sales@CockburnAndAssociates.com?Subject=Use Case Overview, fill out the form found here, or call 801-947-9275

 

Contents of Course:

This course is based on continuous group exercises and discussions, rather than the slide-based lecture form frequently encountered in industry courses. each section of the course a concept gets introduced, the groups do an exercise and discuss, and the entire room discusses their results. this way, each person gets to participate in both exercises and discussions.

We briefly cover topics such as system scope, actors, goal levels, pre- and post-conditions, scenarios, failure discovery, failure handling and sewing together use cases of different levels.

The topics in the course include:

·          What is a use case? What does one look like? How are multiple use cases organized?

·          How do use cases fit into the overall requirements process and requirements document?

·          The four steps in writing a use case.

·          Pass/Fail Tests for use cases.

·          Finding the boundaries of the system.

·          Searching for actors and their goals.

·          Establishing the scope and level of the use case.

·          Understanding a simple scenario of usage.

·          Searching for exceptional and failure situations.

·          Linking use cases.

·          Layering use cases for larger systems.

·          Making use cases easier to read.

·          Common mistakes.

 

Exercises:

Several different domains will be used for exercises, for different degrees of difficulty. For each exercise, a use case will be evaluated, and the group will discuss the issues that came up in the evaluation.

Equipment needed:

Paper and pen/pencil, flipcharts to hang group work output on the walls.

Use Case Overview