Use Cases satisfy the business needs and address the automation of the business processes by scoping the responsibilities of the IT systems and enumerating the steps that must be taken by those systems.
Use Cases at the Intersection of Business and IT
Use cases represent the intersection between the business and the IT areas. As shown in the diagram below, they
Trace back to the high level Business Needs
Specify all or part of a Business Process or Activity, which in turn may have Quality Attributes
May include other use cases
Are realized by Use Cas Realizations (UCR)
Use Case Specifications
Use case specifications can be captured externally to Enterprise Architect, e.g. in a Word document, which can be linked to the Use Case element via the Files tab in the Use Case's properties dialog. This makes it easy to navigate to the use case document right from within the model. This navigation will also work when you publish your model via HTML by co-locating file your published HTML
Enterprise Architect also allows you to capture your documentation in the use case's properties dialog. The image below shows a screen shot of the English language description of the Select Sports Club, Sports Program, League, Division and Team use case.
The Scenarios tab allows you to specific the normal and alternate paths of the use case. The diagram below shows the main path of the use case. By convention, we use bold face labels in square brackets that are used when looping back to a step or branching to an alternate path.
The alternate paths are similarly described.
Sometimes the decision logic of a use case is too complext to be effectively described in text. In these cases, an activity diagram is a better choice.
