Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

The question as to what the differences between Use Cases and User Stories is something that comes up quite often and some people will argue that they both help to achieve the same thing. Further discussion on that I will defer to debate elsewhere.

Over the last few years I have been using what I feel is a combination of the two elements rolled into one. One of the common held notions about User Stories is that they consist of written text that describes a functional unit of the system. Use Cases also describe functional units of work, semantically expressed through the use of the UML. My personal experience has been that the functional requirements can be well captured, represented, worked from and estimated using both approaches combined into one single method. Let me explain by way of example, where a single use case is catalogued using the following templated documents.

Figure 1.0 – User Story

What figure 1.0 shows is that we have combined the concept of several different approaches to suit. The UML for me has always been a great visual way of describing a system to both business stakeholders and developers, the BDD story title mirrors the Use Case name (UML) and the BDD story maps nicely to the Agile concept of the paragraph of text that describes a User Story. Added to that I can include scenarios to test if I am using BDD and further to that we include the document shown here as figure 2.0, the stories ‘Detail Table’.

Figure 2.0 – User Story Detail Table

The detail table I found some time ago somewhere on the web and I cant remember exactly where so my deepest apologies to the author (if you recognize it please let me know and I will update this post). Again some more context here but mainly for the developer however it’s certainly within the grasp of a business analyst. As far as estimation goes, I am an advocate of first up estimation using Case Points Estimation techniques and then factoring in subsequent estimation off velocity and burn down rates.