Usecase Scenario development and User Stories

A common comic mail circulates with this image, which gives good understanding of how requirements captured during a project life cycle goes like this:

Typical Software Development Life-cycle explained

Above picture succinctly tells about common perception of developing a software, how requirement understanding filters with changing roles, time and space with gaps between factual and results. Thanks to the the word "agility", which has evolved in world of software technology with the evolution of Rational unified process the term use-case or scenario development for documenting and capturing requirement in the initial phase of software development.

"A use case is a software artifact of systems and process of expected sequence of interactions between a module and an external actor, which leads the actor to desired goals and objectives."

Use case scenarios can be mirrored as clip of a movie making scene development where-in director has assigned a script or stories to actors to act in the dialog delivery with lights, camera and action that's called a TAKE.

On the very same lines we have User Stories which can be a powerful tool to be converted into a Use-case scenarios. User Stories can be categorized into user needs, wants and demands from usability perspective of the system development.

Definitely Use cases are key building blocks of any software development life cycle which is again powered by user stories. It is well known fact, mislead requirement will lead to many gaps created in early part of project to be rectified at each cycle of the project in later phases of the project.

Use Cases: Requirements in Context (2nd Edition)

User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

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