Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#

17. Use Cases

Use cases are a wonderful idea that has been vastly overcomplicated. Over and over again, I have seen teams sitting and spinning in their attempts to write use cases. Typically, such teams thrash on issues of form rather than substance. They argue and debate over preconditions, post-conditions, actors, secondary actors, and a bevy of other things that simply don’t matter.

The real trick to use cases is to keep them simple. Don’t worry about use case forms; simply write them on blank paper or on a blank page in a simple word processor or on blank index cards. Don’t worry about filling in all the details. Details aren’t important until ...