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Concept
Use case
Summary
In software and systems engineering, the phrase use case is a polyseme with two senses:
A usage scenario for a piece of software; often used in the plural to suggest situations where a piece of software may be useful.
A potential scenario in which a system receives an external request (such as user input) and responds to it.
This article discusses the latter sense.
A use case is a list of actions or event steps typically defining the interactions between a role (known in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as an actor) and a system to achieve a goal. The actor can be a human or another external system. In systems engineering, use cases are used at a higher level than within software engineering, often representing missions or stakeholder goals. The detailed requirements may then be captured in the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) or as contractual statements.
In 1987, Ivar Jacobson presented the first article on use cases at the OOPSLA'87 conference. He described how this technique was used at Ericsson to capture and specify requirements of a system using textual, structural, and visual modeling techniques to drive object-oriented analysis and design. Originally he had used the terms usage scenarios and usage case – the latter a direct translation of his Swedish term användningsfall – but found that neither of these terms sounded natural in English, and eventually he settled on use case.
In 1992 he co-authored the book Object-Oriented Software Engineering - A Use Case Driven Approach, which laid the foundation of the OOSE system engineering method and helped to popularize use cases for capturing functional requirements, especially in software development. In 1994 he published a book about use cases and object-oriented techniques applied to business models and business process reengineering.
At the same time, Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh worked at unifying their object-oriented analysis and design methods, the Booch method and Object Modeling Technique (OMT) respectively.
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