Use cases

Another week and another post about object oriented analysis and design. This time I write about use cases, an important element of the modeling system.

In software development we deal all days with requirements from customers, but this requirements are just a vague idea on how the things need to be done. Before going into uses cases, let me write a little about requirements.

Let’s suppose that you’re inside a company and the marketing have an idea about increase appearances on Google (this is called SEO). They read and article about a cool trick to increase views and and now they want to change the structure of all the paths in the URL in order to add some flags in HTML code to make the page more visible on the internet. The task is huge because you need to modify all the page structure and things still should work. In real terms, it is a complete refactor before adding a single HTML element and you think it is not worth it.

A good way to react before this situations is to talk to the team and ask them exactly what they want do they want to make a complete refactor of the page or do they only need to apply that little trick yo make the page more visible on the internet? If the answer is the second option, then you can find another ways to get to the solution, maybe some Stack Overflow research may come in handy and after that maybe you can solve the problem they have but using the way you want.

After that, it is time to start talking about use cases. A use cases is when you specify the expected behavior of your program and also you specify the methods to make it happen.

A use case can be a visual representation of how the program works from the USER PERSPECTIVE. You don’t need to code yet. Use case must describe possible scenarios when your client interacts with your software. If you don’t cover all the scenarios then the use cases analysis is not complete. Use cases are important because with them you can obtain many potential requirements, and with the correct requirements, the missing part becomes easier.

Here is a video that explain this concept better:

 

References:

https://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/use-case