A previous IRM paper – How to use Use Cases – highlighted the need for clear and logical thinking when documenting the primary and alternate flows of a use case. A use case diagram is all well and good for communicating the scope of a particular event but to explain what’s happening inside the use case we need to revert back to a textual description.
The How to use Use Cases paper described a relatively simple event – a student registering for a course. Whilst the primary flow had 5 steps, the alternate flow in the formal (fully specified) use case involved 9 steps each comprising 3 or 4 interactions. The line by line description of the alternate flow ran to one full side of A4 paper and quickly became an exercise in concentration! So how else could we write it?
Read the full paper here: How to Write Use Cases
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User Stories & The Jungle Book
What Happens After User Stories?
