Use cases have been around for almost 30 years as a requirements approach and have been part of the inspiration for more recent development artifacts such as user stories. Now the inspiration has flown in the other direction. Use-Case 2.0, as developed by Ivar Jacobson, Ian Spence, and Brian Kerr, is the new generation of use-case-driven development—light, Agile, and lean—inspired by user stories and the Agile methodologies of Scrum and Kanban. Use-Case 2.0 has all the popular values from the past, such as supporting requirements alongside architecture, design, test, and user experience, but now includes the introduction of an important new concept, the use case slice.
We recently sat down with Ivar Jacobson, who is widely touted as the father of component architecture, aspect-oriented software development, UML, RUP, and a multitude of other principles that have shaped the current software development landscape, to discuss his book Use-Case 2.0 and the role of use cases in Agile development practices.
Use cases, as argued by Jacobson, “include the techniques that are provided by user stories, but offer significantly more for larger systems, larger teams, and more complex and demanding development projects than user stories alone. They are as lightweight as user stories but can also scale in a smooth and structured way to incorporate as much detail as needed. Most importantly, they drive and connect many other aspects of software development.”
Read the full article at BluePrint and listen to the interview recording!