Building Web Applications with UML Second Edition

Use Cases

Writing simple statements is an excellent way to capture and to prioritize performance, hardware, deployment, and usability requirements but is a little lacking for capturing functional ones. Functional requirements describe how the system behaves in response to user and external system input. They tend to be more dynamic and often require greater detail in order to clearly understand them. Use cases are a powerful technique for capturing and expressing detailed system behavior. Use cases were first put forward by Ivar Jacobson.^[2] Other favorite resources of mine on use cases are Alistair Cockburn,^[3] Larry Constantine and Lucy Lockwood.^[4] Use cases are a formal way to capture and to express the interaction and the dialogue between ...