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What is the difference between User Stories and Use case scenario , purpose-wise ?
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Scenarios are created by user researchers to help communicate with the design team. User stories are created by project/product managers to define the requirements prior to a sprint in agile development. Use cases are created for developers to help with testing.
For example a system use case might be "return book when overdue" and would describe the interactions of the various actors (borrower, librarian) with the system in carrying out the end-to-end process.
For example, user stories might look like: As Max, I want to invite my friends, so we can enjoy this service together. As Sascha, I want to organize my work, so I can feel more in control. As a manager, I want to be able to understand my colleagues progress, so I can better report our sucess and failures.
Use Cases are more like a contract while Use Stories are a planning tool. Consequently, Use Cases usually outlive User Stories since they (should) serve as documentation that concretely reflects the built system.
User stories are written by the customer/stakeholder/client/user. User stories aren't very detailed and are relatively open to interpretation.
Use cases are more formal in structure and are often written by a someone on the team - requirements engineer/product manager. They are often more detailed, breaking down an interaction into individual steps, and clearly identifying pre-conditions and post-conditions such as failure conditions and success conditions.
While one Use Case can cover many scenarios - success and failure; validation errors; sub use-cases and extensions - a User Story is more limited in scope, usually describing a single scenario.
See also User_story#Comparing_with_use_cases on Wikipedia, as well as the chapter "What Use Cases are Not" in the book User Stories Applied.
Lastly, according to Allistair Cockburn...
A user story is synonymous with “feature” as used in the 1990s, a marker for what is to be built, fine-grained enough to fit into modern iteration/sprint periods.
A use case provides a contextual view of what is to be built, serving to bind the organization together, among other things.
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"A user story is to a use case as a gazelle is to a gazebo." -- Cockburn
User Stories (opposed to requirements) are brief statements of intent that describe something the system needs to do for some user. It's a primary technique used by agile teams to understand and communicate customer requirements. It’s certainly a handy construct, and small user stories help us drive the extreme instrumentalism that characterizes agile development.
Use Cases are a traditional way to express system behavior in complex systems. Use cases are the primary means to represent requirements with the UML. They are well described there as well as in a variety of texts on the subject. Use cases can be used for both specification and analysis. They are especially useful when the system of interest is in turn composed of other subsystems.
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