Writing Effective Use Cases
by Alistair Cockburn · first published 2000
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6HN commenters
2011–2026first – last mentioned
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This guide will help readers learn how to employ the significant power of use cases to their software development efforts. It provides a practical methodology, presenting key use case concepts.
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…The funny thing is that BDD isn't even a new thing because it relies on scenarios. It is very similar to Use Cases with one minor, but important, difference: there was no standardization on Use Cases (Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn is a great book). Cockburn left the way scenarios are written open to the engineers whereas BDD provides a simple language, Gherkin, that can be used consistently across different…
on “How to use BDD to discover value-add for your startup” ↗…http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?DesignPatterns Also, definitely have a look at Peter Norvig's slides: http://norvig.com/design-patterns 3. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper 4. Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn Websites: 1. Obviously, HN, :) 2. http://highscalability.com/ It may look like a huge undertaking, but it really isn't. A quote from Michael Abrash seems appropriate here, "Winning…
on “Ask HN: How can I learn to architect a production web app?” ↗If they fall into the formal specification category, I've found Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn to be very helpful.
on “Reflections on Programming” ↗Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn [1] is a pretty solid style guide for technical writing. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Effective-Cases-Alistair-Cock...
on “E. B. White’s “Plain Style” at 75” ↗Gathering user requirements using use cases is a proven technique that Alistair Cockburn described in detail in his book Writing Effective Use Cases back in 2000. The use cases are developed during requirements engineering with the users and serve as a guide for the development of the solution. In practice, knowledge transfer from business to engineering…
…otherwise broken up into individual phases. You can always ask an LLM to create a starter set of docs to get you going and then maintain as you go along. For the management nerds, none of this is new. See: Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn and Agile Specification-Driven Development by Ostroff, Makalsky and Paige. The fundamentals remain the same and I'd say become even more important in a brownfield context with a high…
on “Ask HN: Are you still using spec driven development?” ↗