Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx04.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: David Lamb Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Who gets interviewed to produce use cases? Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:26:41 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 18 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2012 18:26:44 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="c397b0271b118225329a50c7668d0388"; logging-data="26148"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX190w25P06RUiGzoDJvXXA37" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:14.0) Gecko/20120713 Thunderbird/14.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:ybMOJX5XgwI0XzJYdH7sFIyMySY= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.java.programmer:17294 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?