How to Use the User Interface to Discover All the Use Cases. December 29, 2009 If you build software for a living, it’s a matter of time before you find yourself discovering too late in a project that some important piece of functionality wasn’t accounted for.
Often this is the result of assumptions — whoever was responsible for writing the functional spec assumed that some piece of functionality must be included, since omitting it would be illogical. Discovery of a missed piece of functionality usually sounds something like: “Of course moderators have to approve user-uploaded photos! 2003/05/16. By Joel Spolsky Friday, May 16, 2003 Years ago, the Excel team was trying to figure out if it would be a good idea to allow users to drag and drop cells using the mouse.
They had a couple of interns "whip up a prototype" suitable for usability testing, using the cutting edge Visual Basic 1.0. Building the prototype took all summer, because it had to duplicate so much of Excel's real functionality or you couldn't do a real usability test. The conclusion of the usability test? The Design of Software (CLOSED) - UI prototyping VS. Use Case Modeling. I'm involved in a big defense software project.
Theproject team is composed from system analysts doing the UI and requirements work, software developersdoing the architecture/design/implementation work anda testing team. Early on in the project it was decided (not by me) to usethe full blown RUP (rational unified process) methodologyto develop the software. As you may already know - in RUP you do most of thefunctional requirements work in the form of Use cases whichare exhausting narratives describing user/system interactions. UI prototyping was considered just another documentrequired by the client (not something we REALLY needto develop the system...) although the software ishighly graphical. The current situation (which I'm trying to change) is thatsystem analysts keep writing every conceivable functionalbehavior right into the use-case model in an effort to nail down everything and almost no effort is spent onusing the prototype and UI people to validate things orto elicit new ideas.
Ui use cases.