Use Case inspection checklist

This inspection checklist was originally created to support my OO courses, but turned out to be very effective for live use on projects. There is a companion checklist that covers OO Design, Enjoy.

  1. Do the intended users agree that the Use Case correctly describes what they want to be able to do with the system?
  2. Does the entire team agree on the vision for the system?
  3. Does the entire team agree that there was sufficient exploration of the requirements space?
  4. Are the Use Cases complete with respect to the Actors Goals and System Scope?
  5. How do we know we have all of the stakeholders?
  6. Are all of the interests of all of the stakeholders captured?
  7. Have the Use Cases been prioritized for delivery?
  8. Are all Use Cases classified to Must Have, Should Have or Nice to Have?
  9. For this delivery increment, are all of the Use Cases at the same level of Precision? (Ensure that the various authors are close enough in style and precision.)
  10. Is the team actively deferring capturing implementation level detail for the Use Cases that are not part of this delivery increment?
  11. Is the set of Actor:Goal pairs complete for this scope?
  12. Are the bulk of the Use Cases defined using a Task level goal? (Strategic and Sub-function goals are to be expected, but should be in a minority)
  13. For each Use Case, are all of the interested parties identified so that they can be involved in creating and reviewing the Use Cases?
  14. Is each Use Case goal written using an active verb phrase, something the system can deliver to the primary actor?
  15. For every Use Case, is Goal Success defined? Is Goal Failure defined?
  16. Does Goal Success protect the interests of the stakeholders?
  17. Does each Use Case have a Main Success Scenario and are the failure conditions defined?
  18. Are the recoverable failures recorded as Extensions?
  19. Are the potential goal failures documented for each subgoal?
  20. Do the Scenario steps reference back to the Stakeholder Interests?
  21. Is the behavior following Unrecoverable Failures specified?
  22. Even in the case of Unrecoverable Failure, are the interests of the stakeholders protected?(the Minimal Guarantee)
  23. Is the number of steps in the complex scenarios excessive (12 to 15 is getting borderline)?
  24. Are all scenarios at the same conceptual level?
  25. For the Task level Use Cases that contain internal design or implementation detail, does the entire team agree that these are valid development constraints?
  26. Is there any potential parallelism in the steps of a scenario?
  27. Do Use Cases with significant Use Interaction include a sketch of the User Interface?
  28. Can test cases be generated for every Use Case? (Given a defined system state, is it possible to define some inputs and the resulting expected outputs and end state?)
  29. Is the presentation and formatting consistent?

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