Utrecht, The Netherlands. August 13, 2009. Smart use cases versus user stories (Nederlandse Spoorwegen)

Web team, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Utrecht.

A growing number of organization slowly migrate towards more agile approaches of their software development. When starting with agile, Scrum is still the most popular process around, with user stories as the preferred requirements technique.

Although Scrum and user stories apply well to many web projects, when it comes to handling large, service-oriented projects, in my opinion more ceremony (to keep up with Alistair Cockburn’s terminology) is required to structure the projects, especially when it comes to identifying, modeling and re-using services and orchestration.

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Discussing smart use cases with the product owner (on the left)

At the Nederlandse Spoorwegen, we have succesfully applied smart use cases to a first agile service-oriented SAP project, using a mix of the agile processes Scrum and Smart. Hence, the web team at the same department of the Nederlandse Spoorwegenhas invited me to present and discuss the use of Scrum and Smart, and to stipulate the use of smart use cases in particular.

One thought on “Utrecht, The Netherlands. August 13, 2009. Smart use cases versus user stories (Nederlandse Spoorwegen)

  1. Lately I have been working with user stories. The requirements are modeled as uml use cases and stereotyped as we are used to when modeling smart use cases. The scenarios are written down so the keyuser understands them, they are also reviewed by them. Even the processes realized by services are designed as user stories. This is a bit unusual, but treated as smart use cases everything is designed and explain clearly to the people what they realize.

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