Build on Use Cases to Deliver Higher-Quality, Higher-Value Software

You can dramatically improve software quality and value by integrating use cases with best-practice software quality engineering disciplines.

Richard Denney presents practical, cost-effective techniques that help your entire development organization deliver superior software.

Using realistic examples, Denney demonstrates how to complement use cases with Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Software Reliability Engineering (SRE), Model-Based Specification (preconditions, postconditions, and invariants), Requirements Configuration Management, and Project Portfolio Management. Denney's techniques address challenges faced by project and product managers, team leads, developers, designers, software engineers, and testers alike. These techniques offer immense value no matter what methodology you use?from the Unified Process to Extreme Programming.

• Use QFD to make sure you release products that are true to your business drivers

• Drive your project's vision vertically, from senior management and marketing to the development team

• Align/synchronize distributed development horizontally across component teams, product teams, and business groups

• Use SRE to maximize reliability and customer satisfaction?while minimizing engineering costs

• Build use case operational profiles that help you spend development dollars more intelligently

• Get solid metrics that tell you when it's time to stop testing

• Use Model-Based Specification to sharpen your analysis of potential failures

• Understand precondition and postcondition realities they never mentioned in "Use Case 101"

• Design effective test cases using preconditions, postconditions, and invariants

• Use Configuration Management of Use Cases to help your company work smarter

• Leverage use cases in Project Portfolio Management?quite possibly the most valuable process improvement you can make

• Calculate ROI on your company's investments in a requirements management tool and process

About the Author

Richard Denney is a software quality consultant with more than twenty-five years of experience in software development and process management. Denney has been a principal in process improvements for the oil industry's two largest suppliers of software solutions, Schlumberger and Landmark Graphics (a Halliburton company), and as an affiliate consultant with TeraQuest Metrics, Inc. (part of Borland Software Corporation).