Usage centric approaches to requirements: benefits

Benefits and limitations

Both use cases and user stories shift from the product centric perspective of requirements elicitation to discussing what users need to accomplish , in contrast to asking users what they want the system to do.

The intent of this approach is to describe tasks that users will need to perform with the system, or user system interactions that will result in a valuable outcome for some stakeholder.

Use cases and user stories work well for exploring the requirements for business applications, websites, kiosks, and systems that let a user control a piece of hardware.

However

They are inadequate for understanding the requirements of certain types of applications. Applications such as batch processes, computationally intensive systems, business analytics, and data warehousing might have just a few use cases. The complexity of these applications lies in the computations performed, the data found and compiled, or the reports generated, not in the user system interactions.

Nor are use cases and user stories sufficient for specifying many embedded and other real time systems.