DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019: Telling the Full Story - Use Cases and User Stories

Lauren Kelly
Pantheon Systems, San Francisco, United States

Most of us have been trained to write user stories.

As a type of user , I want some goal so that some reason .

We write these on whiteboards.
We write these on notecards.
We write these in crazy software that promises to help us work more efficiently.

In the end, they end up being used as a checkbox

Do the tasks I just completed allow this user to complete their goal?
Yes? Done! Check the box, take down the card.

And this is how Frankenstein’s monster was built. Piece by piece. Stitched together. Ugly at the seams - nothing fit together quite right.

You want more for your projects, don’t you?

For that, we need to look at Use Cases. They help us track all the parts and make sure they fit together to tell the whole story.

Use Cases map out each step of the users paths. Documenting these paths helps the entire team see how various pieces of the project fit together, point out redundancies or when entire parts of a system are missing, and help catch scope creep. They help developers work more efficiently. They also turn themselves into test scripts and user documentation at the end.

It is almost too good to be true.

In this session we’ll run through how to turn User Stories into Use Cases. We’ll also cover a few ways to document Use Cases to get the most out of them.

As the presenter, I want to share my love for User Stories and Use Cases with Project Manager and Leads, so that they can go back after DrupalCon and help their teams prevent Monster Projects.

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