Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach

Chapter 13. Applying Use Cases

Key Points

• Use cases, like storyboards, identify the who, what, and how of system behavior.

• Use cases describe the interactions between a user and a system, focusing on what the system "does" for the user.

• The use-case model describes the totality of the system's functional behavior.

In Chapter 12, we described storyboarding and discussed how you can use storyboards to show the who, what, and how of system and user behavior. Use cases are another technique for expressing that behavior. We briefly introduced this technique in Chapters 2 and 5, where we used it to help us model the behavior of a business.

In this chapter, we'll develop the use-case technique further, describing how we can use it to understand the behavior ...