Dutch Railways (NS)

Within Nederlandse Spoorwegen / Dutch Railways (NS) we were struggling with the question of how to get from high level system requirements (features/epics) to the right level of specification to enable agile development. User stories were not a viable option for us as they provided too little information with too little context. Use-Case 2.0 is still a use case but its application has evolved. Use cases are “sliced up” to provide stories or scenarios for agile iterative development, which delivers lightweight stories to our outsourced development team just in time for development while providing NS with the big picture view to support the entire product lifecycle. This article describes how we made the transition from large use cases which were completely written before development to Use Case 2.0 and why this helps us to deliver apps faster and with the right business value.

“Using Use-Case 2.0 for agile projects seems to be an answer to the most important challenges we had on the specification and development side using the Scrum framework. We were able to offer the right level of specifications to our development team to let them work effectively in sprints, and it allowed our users to participate more directly in the development process, because the functionality is developed and released more shortly after user participation.” Jordi Reineman, Manager Analyse & Ontwerp (Analysis and Design)