Use Cases And Stories

What is the difference between a UseCase and XP's UserStory?

This is a common question, and not one that has a generally agreed on answer. Many people in the XP community consider stories to be a simplified form of use cases, but although I used to hold this view I see things differently now.

Use cases and stories are similar in that they are both ways to organize requirements. They are different in that they organize for different purposes. Use cases organize requirements to form a narrative of how users relate to and use a system. Hence they focus on user goals and how interacting with a system satisfies the goals. XP stories (and similar things, often called features) break requirements into chunks for planning purposes. Stories are explicitly broken down until they can be estimated as part of XP's release planning process. Because these uses of requirements are different, heuristics for good use cases and stories will differ.

The two have a complex correlation. Stories are usually more fine-grained because they have to be entirely buildable within an iteration (one or two weeks for XP). A small use case may correspond entirely to a story; however a story might be one or more scenarios in a use case, or one or more steps in a use case. A story may not even show up in a use case narrative, such as adding a new asset depreciation method to a pop up list.

Do you need to do both? As in many things, in theory you do but in practice you don't. Some teams might use use cases early on to build a narrative picture, and then break down into stories for planning. Others go direct to stories. Others might just do use cases and annotate the use case text to show what features get done when.