Review By: Terry Wray
07/08/2010"Succeeding with Use Cases” deals with quantifying your team’s distribution of effort. By using statistical methods, formulas, and principles, it explores ways of determining how business resources should be expended to obtain the maximum benefit. The author’s target audience would include those charged with leading a software testing team. However, he endeavors to abstract this practical application of his methods to show how they apply universally.

The book is broken into four parts of two chapters each. Each part may be used separately, but often a part will refer to a lesson learned in a previous section. All sections require at least an intermediate level of knowledge in quality assurance and reliability engineering. The author doesn’t explain the history or construction of use cases or the UML language, but UML frequently appears in accompanying diagrams.

Most of the book’s scenarios employ use cases as a starting point. The number, frequency, and severity of use cases are used as the basic input for his numerous charts, diagrams, and conclusions.

The writing style of the book will be familiar territory for experienced quality analysts and reliability engineers. It’s verbose and has a liberal use of industry terminology. Denney thoroughly explores each topic and eliminates misunderstanding by describing his ideas at length. As with most technical books, the author takes the position of a mentor. He presents his methods in the context of reality-based situations. For a few topics he includes a low-effort method of getting a similar answer. Each chapter concludes with a review of its major topics.

Denney’s mastery of the topics is obvious, if not intimidating. However, his inference that his methods could be used in the agile and Extreme Programming camp is unrealistic. They are far too complex to facilitate communication with a user. I struggled to wade through the overly-detailed explanations. His copious use of terminology, both standard and self-pioneered, detracts from the book’s credibility.

Although the topic is not a specialty of mine, I found the content of the book to be a concise set of methods that would allow analysts and engineers to approach complex questions and quantify their conclusions with mathematical precision. If your organization demands quantifiable figures on which to base its distribution of effort for a project, this book proves to be a valuable resource.