Customer Reviews

Succeeding with Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality

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When I first picked up this book, my initial reaction was "Great, just what the world needs, yet another book about use cases." Then I noticed the subtitle, Working Smart to Deliver Quality, and thought I should invest a few minutes looking it over. I'm glad that I did. Perusing the table of contents, I noticed sections entitled "Planning the Length of Iterations and Number of Use Cases in Distributed Software Development", "Setting a Failure Intensity Objective", and "Savings from Avoiding Cost of Unnecessary Development" and realized that this was more than just another use case book. Denney provides real world advice, based on his more than 25 years of experience in software development, for how to apply use cases effectively in practice. For anyone wanting to improve their use case writing skills, his insights on preconditions, postconditions, and invariants is well worth the investment in this book. For project managers, Denney's advice for estimating and scheduling based on use cases is both practical and insightful.

As a specialist in the field of software reliability engineering, I have always felt that there were many fruitful relationships between use cases and software reliability engineering. Now Richard Denney focuses on these in his excellent new book Succeeding with Use Cases. I was impressed by the user-driven approach and the bridge Denney provides over the language gap between the business orientation of management and the technical orientation of software developers. The book is readable, practical, and filled with examples. It should be required reading for anyone working with use cases.

I'm a software engineer, specializing in requirements and software quality. I've known about QFD and the House of Quality for over a decade, and I've been using Use Case methodology for years. This is the first (and perhaps the only) book which combines the two methodologies and explains in a straightforward yet sufficiently detailed way how to use these methodologies. If you are struggling with many requests from multiple customers and are trying to identify what is really important, you should read this book. In particular, if you want to satisfy the customers who drive your business, i.e., generate revenue, you need to read this book. This is a low-tech approach; all you need is a spreadsheet. Understanding Use Cases, QFD, or House of Quality is not a prerequisite. Even if you are already familiar with these methodologies, I think you will still learn a lot from this excellent book.

"Succeeding with Use Cases - Working Smart to Deliver Quality" walks you through four quality engineering disciplines: quality function deployment, software reliability engineering, model based specification and use case configuration management. Most of the book is readable by project managers, while model based specification (pre conditions, post conditions and invariants) is of special interest to developers and testers.

As you can guess, the book assumes you already know about use cases. For the most part, the authors are good about going into detail without making any further assumptions of your background. Examples include concrete numbers and the diagrams are excellent. Once chapter does get theoretical and use algebra, but it is immediately followed by a practical application.

Personally, I found the reasoning and walkthrough of the ROI example to be most valuable. The book does read like a short textbook and academics are explicitly mentioned as one of the target audiences. However, you can tell the book is written by someone who has been through it personally. Overall, I found the book to be a valuable read.

This book is about uses of use cases in software engineering. The focus is on doing and managing projects.
Topics are among others selection of standard products, management of project portfolios, or grounding projects in business goals. The last topic is an application of use cases to QFD, a process originally from the automobile industry. Other topics are reliability engineering, modelling and project management (this list is not complete).
All the topics of the book have use cases as a common factor. It is not an introduction into use cases. The application of use cases in this book goes further than what is described in the Rational Unified Process for example. Therefore other books are better in introducing the topic of use cases.
Demo excel sheets are available from the author. The examples are worked out excellently and instructive. The book focuses on the practicalites of software engineering and addresses primarily project leads, designer, architects and testers. Most of the material was new to new, although I have been using use cases for years. It will have the most value for organizations already modelling their software. In my opinion extreme programmers will not find it as useful.

Having consulted and taught use cases for the past 4 years, I'm wary about picking up another book on Use Cases - what's left to be said? I'm very glad that I looked at Richard's book despite this. Rather than focusing on how to write use cases, Richard has written a book that explains clearly and simply: how to decide which use cases to focus your energies on, managing risk in use cases, how to use use cases to drive test, and how to use pre/post-conditions to find potential defects whilst you write the use cases. Richard has definately found a niche that was crying out for attention

I bought "Succeeding with Use Cases" primarily for Part 3 on model-based specification. The book gives a "Blue Collar" approach for specifying operations in terms of change of state. The approach is highly pragmatic and aids writing precise, testable specifications. The author clearly explains what to do. I highly recommend this book.

I was really happy to see Richard's new book. I have always thought that if you are going to go to the effort of writing good use cases, then you should make use of that information as much as possible in the project. This book has a prominant place on my professional bookshelf, and I refer to it often.

Richard Denney gives some great information on using your project use cases in project management, quality control, and reliability. He has a wealth of experience that he shares throughout the book. His book is well written and easy to understand. I am not aware of any other book that covers this information in the context of a software project.

Once you are comfortable with writing use cases (and of course I must recommend my own book Applying Use Cases: A Practical Guide for that purpose), then definitely start exploring what you can do with the use cases once they are written by getting a copy of Richard Denney's book, Succeeding With Use Cases: Working Smart to Deliver Quality.

Wow! What a book! Mr. Denney really succeeds with use cases! If you are like me, that finds the USDP name a little bit presumptuous, you will discover that Mr. Denney's book takes the "U" in Unified very seriously. He shows us in his book how to use Use Cases for real life software engineering. While Mr. Cockburn's insight into the role of use cases (see his book "Writing Effective Use Cases") is limited to a few paragraphs built around the axle and spokes drawing, Mr. Denney delivers a full book of recipes on "how to" bridge the gap between many differing techniques, such as QFD, Reliability, Effective Testing and ROI of tools and techniques. As a Lead Appraiser for the CMMI I find that Software Engineers fault at applying other Engineering techniques to their problem solving. I find implementations of Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR) of little inspiration. Some implementations of Organizational Innovation and Deployment (OID) have such a small range and short focus that it is preposterous that the organization is really seeing a benefit of it. Fortunately for all of us, Mr. Denney's book opens up these practices with ease. By reading Part 1 you can use QFD to cover the practices of DAR in at least two ways. The same can be said for Part 2, Reliability Engineering. It goes beyond DAR, however, in that it covers practices of the Quantitatively Managed Level (Maturity Level 4). By using some of the techniques that the book describes in this Part so clearly you can implement practices of Quantitative Project Management (QPM) and Organizational Process Performance (OPP). Part 3 will help you define crisper, more effective test cases. From Part 4 you will learn how to define the ROI of a technological change: A significant contribution to OID. I am awaiting Mr. Denney's next forage into Software Engineering with eagerness.

Example after example; model after model! After reading this book, I was ready to begin implementation! Chapter 3, Operational Profiles, will convince and evangelize engineering and management. The degree of detail is perfect for the professional. Great Work!