We start discussing user requirements and two of the most representative ways are use cases and user stories. We will discuss both of them: what they are about, differences between them and how the modelling process goes on after their definition. We also look into how to write effective user stories for their management and implementation, looking at some suggestions.

Lecture

• User Requirements: Use Cases vs User Stories
• Example for the user story structure
• Suggestions on how to split user stories (part 1, part 2), from Leffingwell's book

Reading Material

• From Use Cases to Class Diagrams with OCL
  
• The top-10 Requirements Traps [annotated version]

The following is a sample from the book G. Adzic and D. Evans, Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories. Leanpub, 2013, that takes a practice-oriented approach in giving suggestions about the improvement of the creation of User Stories (http://leanpub.com/50quickideas).

• Sample from "Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories"

Tools for User Stories / Use Cases Support

The following tools can be useful to create/manage user stories and use cases:

User Stories:

• Trello (probably fastest tool to start using to write user stories)
• Jira Agile
• StoriesOnBoard
• FeatureMap
• OrangeScrum
• KanBoard
  
• (many others...)
  

Use Cases

• Any UML tool supporting Use Cases, like the following:
  • ArgoUML (probably fastest to start using, there is also a webstart application)
  • Visual Paradigm (more complete but you will need a license after the trial and takes more time to learn)