Requirements Elicitation with Use Cases

Abstract

Nowadays, the complexity of the software systems that needs to be produced is staggering. Developing such systems requires that the development team first understands the problem, i.e., they have a global picture of what is required to be built, before they can make a sensible judgment on an architecture for the solution. Use cases offer a simple, storytelling-like way to capture the requirements. They provide a means for facilitating the capture and validation of requirements from stakeholders, technical and non-technical alike, which makes them an important tool to have in one’s development kit. The simplicity of the use case concept is nevertheless deceptive, because writing effective use cases requires much practice and experience. In fact, there are many issues that must be addressed on the road to mastering requirements elicitation with use cases. In this tutorial, a number of these issues will be raised and addressed, giving the participants a better understanding of what an effective use case is, how to produce them, and where use cases in general can be appropriately applied.