Requirements Gathering with Use Cases for Business Analysts

Lean Business Use Cases Help You Manage Complexity

Use Case Models are well suited to building a product backlog. They are the ideal tool for representatives of the business community to identify, clarify, and organize functional software requirements for a digital solution.

Use Cases define the interactions between people and technology. They enable business users to talk to Information Technology (IT) professionals about what the business needs in a manner both parties can understand. Use Cases also enable IT professionals to talk about technology to the business community without using technical jargon.

User Stories and other forms of textual requirements are phenomenal ways of expressing business needs but they often lack context. That leads to ambiguous and subjective interpretations creating software that does not meet the business needs. Use Case Models, however, provide this context and are easily understandable by all stakeholders (customers, users, managers, developers, and testers). Creating and distributing Use Cases significantly decreases miscommunication that causes incorrect implementation of requirements. The time spent up front  drastically reduces the overall time required to develop a viable product that meets the business needs. Use Cases are essential for Agile Teams that are not co-located!

Lean Use Cases are becoming the de facto standard for defining and communicating functional requirements in Lean and Agile environments. Applying the Lean philosophy of waste reduction to the Use Case concept creates a powerful tool for communication to and within a Lean or Agile Software Development team.

Writing a Lean Use Case is a skill that anyone in an organization can easily acquire. Learning how to write and manage Lean Use Cases at varying levels of detail is a major step in getting your IT applications to do what you want them to do. Knowing why you need a Lean Use Case, when to create one (especially in a lean environment), and where to put what information is critical to creating high-quality functional requirements.

Learn How Lean Use Cases Improve Communication in a Lean / Agile Setting

This exercise and example-rich business analysis training course explains the who, what, when, where, how and why of Lean Use Case models. Learn how Use Cases augment Lean and Agile software development by providing just enough detail at every point in the Agile development process.

To easily discover Use Cases, we include a section on Event-Response Analysis, Vision Statement Analysis, and Example- or Scenario-based Use Case Identification.

After finishing this course, you can write high-quality Use Cases defining actors, pre-conditions, post-conditions, main paths, alternate paths, exception paths and more.