HEAD BUSINESS AGILITY & BUSINESS ANALYSIS | CMC PARTNERSHIP CONSULTANCY LTD
Lyn Girvan
Lynda Girvan has over 25 years’ experience in business analysis, systems development and transformational change. She has extensive experience of adding value to organisations, from coaching agile development teams through to advising and coaching on Board-level change programmes. Lynda’s particular strength is applying her knowledge of business analysis and agile to help organisations overcome challenging business problems. She is CMC Partnership Consultancy Ltd’s Head of Agile and Business Analysis, an Agile Coach with the Scrum Alliance, and a Fellow of the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. Lynda is co-author of the BCS books, ‘Agile and Business Analysis 2nd edition‘ (2024) and ‘Agile from first principles’ (2022), and an experienced speaker and keynote speaker on these and other subjects at both UK and international conferences.
Presentation: So, you think you know use cases?
Use cases have been around since the mid 1980s, and for many BAs are still the ‘go to’ technique to provide the wider context and understand the system functionality and behaviour. I regularly hear statements from stakeholders such as, “we need to define the use cases for this?” or “this use case is our priority”, and wonder if they mean an actual use case or if they are just referring to functionality in general. Add the term ‘user story’ into the mix and the understanding and value of use cases as an analytical technique can become lost and confused.
Recently, I had the pleasure of helping Ivar Jacobson, the father of use cases, and Alistair Cockburn, author of ‘Writing Effective Use Cases’, lead a resurgence of use cases. This work resulted in a revised and simplified ‘Use Case Foundation’ that will make use cases simpler to understand and easier to integrate with other techniques such as user stories.
In this talk I will share the new Use Case Foundation and show practical examples of how use cases can be applied, alongside user stories, to maintain context whilst achieving agility in a scaled delivery environment.
Attendees will:
- Become familiar with what a use case is through the new Use Case Foundation
- Understand the difference between, and where best to apply, a use case and user story
- Learn how use cases and user stories can work together to drive agile delivery