Can I use the Use Case Diagram in SCRUM?
I'm starting a project with a team and we're using SCRUM as methodology. It's my first time with SCRUM. We have listed our functionalities and we made our stories, (user stories and technical stories as well as their tasks).
I've a tight UML approach to start any dev project and for me, after listing all the functionalities, the next step is to make the User Cases Diagram to let everybody see what's the application going to do and who's gonna interact with it. But my team said that there's no interest in using UML in SCRUM.
Can I use the User Diagram of UML to represent the User Stories in SCRUM? Which other diagrams can be used in SCRUM? (It could be a stupid question 'cause I cannot imagine an application without a class Diagram or a Sequence Diagram, but I really wanna see the advice from the experts in SCRUM)
Thanks.
Answer
Can I use the User Diagram of UML to represent the User Stories in SCRUM?
A use case diagram would be helpful, because it is pretty straightforward, and gives a high level idea what the project is about.
However I won't recommend to use any other UML diagram in scrum. I agree with the others that in an agile project the code changes so frequently that your diagrams will be obsolete after several days. In this case you have to redraw them, which is a waste.
For example if you are using eclipse for development, a simple refactoring step can ruin your class diagram :-(
Which other diagrams can be used in SCRUM?
I would suggest to use mindmaps. Recently we started to create our own user stories with drawing large mindmaps and put them on the office walls.
We have a feature in the middle, and we connect sub user stories to it - and sub-sub user stories to them -, and every available information we have at the moment. With this approach we have everything in one place: user stories, technical informations, questions, etc.
Of course the mindmap grows day by day, and we know more and more about the feature we have to implement.
Actually we are doing something similar described in this agile dzone article, but since you are using scrum not xp+kanban I talked about user stories not MMFs.