Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases

An interesting-looking book has just dropped into my hands. Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle, edited by Ian Alexander and Neil Maiden (Wiley, 2004) seems to be filed on the systems development shelves, which is no doubt why it hasn't raised it's head over the User-Centred Design parapet.

And that is exactly where the book should be. Throughout the HCI/UCD community, there are clusters of people saying we need to interact more with the systems engineering and software development people, present at their conferences, convey ideas. Alexander and Maiden are addressing those communities directly through the bookshelves, battling it out with tomes on module testing, PRINCE2 and all the rest, rather than nestling in the UCD bookshelf comfort zone.

The volume kicks off with a great quote from an unexpected quarter: "What's it for?" said President Chirac on being shown the Millenium Dome in Greenwich (London). Which is what any developer ought to be asking when any new system twinkles in the eyes of management.

Chapter contributors - who include Alexander and Maiden themselves, as well as David Benyon of Napier, John Carroll of Penn State, Karen Holtzblatt of InContext, Juha Savolainen of Nokia, Mary Beth Rosson of Penn State, and Joy Van Helvert of Chimera - then go on to address such issues as using scenarios in requirements discovery, and negative scenarios and misuse cases.

There are plenty of cases, such as the use of scenarios in air traffic control, and story use in automotive systems engineering, as well as practical guidance on, for instance, running a use case/scenario workshop.

It's rare to find a good book that emphasises people and their work and that is, at the same time, aimed squarely at the developer community. With so much so-called requirements work in the real world still stuck at the stage of back-room document drafting based on unwarranted assumptions and collections of - often pointless - functions, this book is a breath of fresh air, providing practical guidance on incorporating techniques and approaches to the development cycle.

Ian Alexander (also co-author of Writing Better Requirements) is one of the few people I've come across that is genuinely interested in bridging the disciplines in this area. He has an interesting and well-written, cross-disciplinary set of book reviews on his website.