Artifact: Use Case Model Guidelines

The Use Case Model is a diagram illustrating the scope of the application being built. The diagram contains actors (roles played by people or systems external to the application being built) and the services or functions they request from the application.

More detail: Purpose - Audience - Template

Click the icons for definition

Purpose

The Use Case Model is a simple diagram (using UML notation) identifying actors and their goals for interacting with the system. These goals may also be considered services or features of the application. The diagram is often used as the primary representation of the project's scope. Details are revealed in the use case specifications and the Artifact: Supplementary Specification.

The Artifact: Business Use Case Model represents the scope of a business. The Use Case Model represents the scope of an application. Therefore, a single Business Use Case Model may have many (system) Use Case Models associated with it, where each Use Case Model represents a single application.

Audience

The following roles use the Use Case Model:

• The Role: Requirements Analyst uses the model to define the actors, application scope, and use case relationships. It is a critical tool for communicating with Stakeholders and other team members.
• The Role: Stakeholder uses it to verify that the project team understands the scope of the project and how the desired functionality supports the actors.
• The Role: Software Architect and project manager use the Use Case Model to understand the project scope and to define objectives for project iterations.
• The Role: Tester Designer, Role: Software Designers, Role: Information Architects, Role: Creative Concept Directors, and all other roles use the Use Case Model to understand the application's scope, users, interfacing systems, and functional dependencies.