1 Trading Recipies

This is a great example of how practices used software development can benefit web designers. I’ve also written a bit on the subject too of a more agile approach (taken from software design) and it’s application to building web applications with standards:

http://hookom.blogspot.com/2004/12/easing-project-development-with-css.html

posted at 08:02 am on January 25, 2005 by Jacob Hookom

2 Good article and useful approach

Thank you! Good article and very useful sounding approach. One point I’d like to make is, in my experience, this type of activity generally needs to happen during the RFP phase (before the client is “your” client).

posted at 08:43 am on January 25, 2005 by Jan Marie Schmidt

3 More useful than university

Thats just distilled several weeks of lectures on UML into a much easier to understand approach. Thanks very much.

posted at 09:27 am on January 25, 2005 by Rob Waring

4 helpful for teams

I can definitely see this coming in helpful for teams. I suppose you could parellel this to something like documenting your own code. It’s especially recommended when working with programming teams, but can also be highly beneficial to oneself.

Plus, pictures make for easier understanding on project managers and clients and the non-techies.

The use of use-cases is also very similar to writing pseudo-code. In the end, the lesson learned is that you need to draw some kind of map out of the project before diving right in.

posted at 09:32 am on January 25, 2005 by Dustin Diaz

5 Jan Marie makes an excellent point

As Jan Marie pointed out, you can use this approach to land a client or even write an RFP

posted at 10:25 am on January 25, 2005 by Tim Meehan

6 Ackkk! College Nightmares

Actors, UML and documention, oh my! Nice to have a double issue (if it is), just having some flashbacks to my software project courses.

posted at 11:05 am on January 25, 2005 by Justin Perkins

7 What's the difference to scenarios

A tool I like to use a lot is creating scenarios. I would say they are the same than use-cases, except scenarios are explained by words instead of pictures. I would recommend to use both, the use-case gives the overview, the scenario tells the client what happens (in case you don’t present it).
Am I wrong with my interpretation?

posted at 11:21 am on January 25, 2005 by Michael Hartmann

8 Scenarios

Michael, yes, storyboarding a project in terms of user-scenarios might be considered an informal application of the idea of use cases.

The chief advantage of the more formal approach that use cases encourage is that they make it easier to infer and explore relationships between different scenarios, which is very useful later on, when making more specific decisions about implementation and functionality.

posted at 11:45 am on January 25, 2005 by Norm Carr

9 Scenarios

We include user scenarios as the make up of the use case. The use case defines the goal and the user scenarios make up the tasks to acheive said goal. So the use case actually puts boundaries around the scope by grouping the user scenarios.

posted at 11:57 am on January 25, 2005 by Tim Meehan

10 Clarification

A use case is a description of the interactions between some actors and a system in order to achieve some goals. A scenario is a specific instance of those interactions. You can think of a use case as a collection of scenarios. Many things can happen in a use case (from success to failures).

A use case is usually in text and can be as short as a paragraph to a fully-dressed written with all the details. It is nice to have diagrams, but the text is essential.

These use cases can be presented in another way using UML. The result is those diagrams. The ones used in this article are usually called the “use case model”. There is a box to delimit the system’s boundaries, with the actors on the ouside and the use cases inside. Scenarios can also be diagrammed into sequence diagrams.

I wish the author would have shown a concrete example of the “publish weblog” use case. We are told it is a use case, but what does it do? It can be interpreted differently by different people, and that is confusing. Another article to go into more details would be nice.

posted at 12:06 pm on January 25, 2005 by Zelnox