User stories vs use cases

Question

Are use cases just multiple user stories??

What are the benefits of using user stories over use cases.. and vice-versa... When to use one over other... Does all agile methodologies uses user stories??

Answer 1

Actually, the original use cases (see Jacobson's OOSE) were pretty lightweight, much as user stories are now. Over time, they evolved until a common format for "use cases" now is a complicated document with inputs, outputs, inheritance, uses relationships, pseudocode, etc. Programmers, in general, try to convert everything into programming.

In any case, the attempt to defined what distinguishes a "use case" from a "user story" fro a "scenario" is pretty futile, as it's hard to find two authorities who agree.\

Personally, I find the pattern "[Actor] [verbs] [noun] to get [business value]" helpful. If it gets over about a paragraph of text, it may be too big.

Answer 2

When it comes down to it "agile" is just a label, and people disagree over exactly what it means. Similarly people call very different things "use cases."

In my experience the primary difference between the two is that a user story is focused on the user, and is usually shorter and less formal - ideally, it should easily fit on a postcard. It probably doesn't give details of error handling etc.

Use cases can be much more formal (although some people write them informally too) - they focus on every interaction with the system, and may well go into more detail about several different systems/actors/etc within the same use case.

That's just my experience though - chances are everyone will have used these tools in different ways. I wouldn't get too hung up about labels - just use what works for your project.