Applying Use Cases: A Practical Guide, Second Edition

Chapter 5. Diagramming Use Cases

We have spent a lot of time writing text for our use cases. But as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. In this chapter we’ll look at three kinds of “pictures” we can use to add detail to, or clarify, our use cases. We’ll use activity diagrams to document the steps of the use case. We’ll add another section to the use case document for activity diagrams. We’ll use simple sequence diagrams to show the actor-to-system interactions. These can also be added to the use case document. We’ll use storyboarding to show the sequence of events from the user interface point of view. Storyboards take a lot of room, so we will put these in documents separate from the use cases, but referred to by the use ...