Agility Guide

Let us assume here that your aspirations toward agility have not led you into the treacherous tar pit of hacking with no prior thought for the real requirements, but are (correctly) causing you to question your processes and abandon any that are not giving you the maximum return for effort expended. In this light, we suggest that scenarios give you a handsome return on the effort invested.

Rabbit projectsthe most agile onesuse scenarios as a trawling technique to discover their stakeholders' optimal way of working. The requirements analysts and the appropriate stakeholders come together to build a scenario for one business use case at a time. Scenarios are often a faster means to find the normal case and the exceptions and alternatives cases. That is, it is faster to find the required functionality by working with scenarios than it is by coding prototypes. The rabbit scenarios disregard the nonfunctional requirementsthese can be discovered later by coding prototypes.

Horse projects might consider scenarios as an alternative to writing functional requirements. Certainly they are useful for eliciting requirements. Also, when they have been developed enough, they can serve to inform the developers of the functional needs of the product. However, this approach does not work all the time. If you have complex products, or if you need the functional requirements documented for contractual purposes, then the scenarios are not themselves sufficient.

Elephant projects make use of scenarios as a discovery tool. The meetings with the stakeholders are used to go over the desired way of working for each of the business use cases. When the scenario is completethat is, when the exceptions and alternatives have been discovered and/or decidedit is used as the basis for writing the functional requirements. Elephant projects should keep their scenarios as part of the documentation. Usually the developers want to see them when they start programming.