Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle

PREFACE

A quoi ça sert?

What's it for?

President Chirac of France,

on being shown a famous white elephant,

the Millennium Dome, Greenwich

Communicating Needs

Much of the recent history of large engineering projects—software or systems—has been a tale of waste, error, mismanagement, over-optimism, and lack of proper planning for likely costs and risks. Projects come in late, over budget, and with miserably reduced functionality. Systems sometimes never work, fail on their first period of operational stress, or are permanently unreliable and costly to maintain. We will not name names, as it is fruitless to play the blame game; indeed, engineering systems badly and passing blame are two sides of the same coin. In any case, it is all too easy to find examples in news reports of the demise of famous projects.

By the way, we do not think this is a software issue: it seems to affect complex systems of diverse kinds. The solution cannot therefore be a matter of finding better software-specific tools and techniques; it must be something that helps master complexity.

People have suggested many possible cures for this disease. Most come down to two things:

• the needs that systems are supposed to fulfil ought to be defined much earlier and far more carefully;
• people on projects ought to be made aware of and become skilled in techniques to define needs adequately.

We think that a critical element that is therefore lacking is communication and, in particular, skill in techniques for communicating ...