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Shaping Software

Enduring Ideas in the Realm of Software

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Scenarios

Scenario and Feature Frame

A Scenario and Feature Frame is a quick way to show your project’s incremental value and dependencies.  It’s helpful for showing your management what you’ll deliver in terms of a baseline release.  It’s helpful for you in terms of finding ways to reduce dependencies.  If you have a bunch of scenarios that depend on certain …

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What’s a Scenario

Photo by Wonderlane What’s a scenario?  Not everybody uses the term “scenario” the same way.  In the software industry, there’s three common usages of scenario: The same as a use case. A path through a use case. An instance of a use case. Usually, the most helpful one is “an instance of a use case.”  …

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5 Situations for Writing Use Cases

What are five common project situations for writing use cases?  In Writing Effective Use Cases (Agile Software Development Series), Alistair Cockburn identifies five different situations for writing use cases to help you better understand variances between the purposes and approaches. Five Project TypesCockburn identifies the following five particular situations: Eliciting requirements, even if use cases …

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patterns & practices Solution Engineering

This is one of my favorite figures that shows how we do solution engineering in patterns & practices at Microsoft:   Architectural Scenarios It all starts with a scenario.  It has to be a meaningful problem.  You can’t evaluate an architecture in a vacuum.  In order for us to build useful baseline architectures, we need …

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