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From: "Arne Vajhøj" <arne.vajhøj@1:261/38.remove-odu-this>
Subject: Re: Who gets interviewed to produce use cases?
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Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:38:34 GMT
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  To: David Lamb
From: "Arne Vajhoj" <arne.vajhoj@1:261/38.remove-nlb-this>

  To: David Lamb
From: Arne Vajhoj <arne@vajhoej.dk>

On 8/7/2012 2:26 PM, David Lamb wrote:
> Does anyone have data, or at least an informed opinion, on how often
> genuine users of a proposed piece of software get consulted on
> developing use cases (or some close equivalent)? I ask here because of
> the recent UML discussion and because I've seen people, especially Lew,
> mention use cases reasonably frequently.
>
> In an informal discussion with a colleague I was arguing based on things
> I'd read that "modern best practices" recommended interviewing the
> people who will actually use a software system in their jobs, rather
> than only upper management or professional consultants. He said the
> industry standard was to resell an old system to new customers and
> charge for every small attempt to get it to work the way the customers
> wanted.
>
> Is he being excessively cynical, or am I being excessively naive? Does
> anyone know which of us is closer to right? Is the answer different for
> the Java and object-oriented-development community than it is for other
> developers?

It is my clear impression that it is widely accepted that the real domain 
experts must be involved in detailed requirements gathering (use cases or other 
methods). For GUI that means the people that is to use the GUI. For business 
rules that means the people that actually make or understand those rules.

Customer management making up requirements is mostly a myth - no manager want 
to write 100's/1000's/10000's of pages of requirements documentation.

The real problems are that:
- the domain experts now how the old systems works but may have
   huge difficulties explaining how the new system should work
- asking people about requirements is an open invitation to
   scope creep

Most software development today is object oriented (not always a good/elegant 
way, but ...).

I don't think Java is different from C# or PHP or C++ regarding requirements 
(and it is common to use more than one language in the overall solution 
anyway).

Arne

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