USE CASE

USE CASE:

What is a Use Case?

Use cases are textual representations of the interactions between an actor/role and the business system to perform an activity. Use cases focus on what interactions need to occur and what data needs to be exchanged without stating now the interaction will be accomplished using technology. Each use cases documents the complete course of events or steps needed to accomplish a single goal. Usually it takes a group of use cases to document the complete functional requirements of an automated system. (Actor/role may be another system)

Benefits of Use Cases – Why Use Cases are created:

The activities surrounding the creation of use cases are just as valuable as the use case documents itself. The use case serves as a focal point of discussion and can be used to methodically and thoroughly drive the analysis to join business goals and user preference/behavior with logical system behavior.

The use case also:

1.         Clearly explains what is expected of a user and the system to accomplish a business goal.

2.       Provides contest for the functional requirements, rules and data elements, tells a story

3.    Reduce the ambiguity of requirement statements by specifying exactly when and under what conditions certain behavior occurs.

4.   Not only explains the ideal set of steps, but also describes what can go wrong, and what happens if anything does go wrong.

5.    Delineates which steps of a process or captivity are reusable among different paths and which steps are unique to a path.

6.    Allows team to fully define what the software should do prior to defining now the functionality will be provided

7.  Provide a tool to the team to methodically drive out requirement details (in the form of additional “Ability to” statements, data elements, and rules)

8.  Easy to comprehend by a wide audience including business analysts, enterprise architects, systems analyst, test analyst, product owners etc.; avoids technical jargon and business lingo.

9.      Easily consumed by managed services vendors; many have indicated that use cases are the most helpful source of information when the teams are first trying to understand what needs to be built; this in turn may prevent build errors.

10.     Traceability to test cases other user cases- shows coverage and business objectives being met; and is a company’s expectation, industry standard.

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