Use Cases

--Originally published at Newbie Programmer

The use cases help us to describe what our products must have to do to achieve our customer goals, for this we need to separate the main goal into something like can be defined as user stories that are specific goals for the clients, for this we can use modeling languages like UML (Unified Modeling Language), where you use things like an a diagram when you have an actor, actions, and the relationship between them.

The actor is a person, organization, systems, everything that can be played as a role and can interact with our application, the associations are indicated by lines and the things they want to do its in the ovals.

For explaining this i think its more easily to see an actual use case diagram, because if you understand how the diagram work is easy to know what is the deal with an use case.

Screenshot_2018-10-01 Diagrama en blanco Lucidchart

I made this diagram for doing the use cases of a warehouse, you can see the actors, the Distributor and the Attendant (the actors), for explaining an use cause i can choose one of the actions (one of the ovals), for example when the Attendant needs to know how much products have in stock, we can make an use case.

  1. Attendant want to know how much products the warehouse have.
  2. Attendant search into the system or count the products available.
  3. If the warehouse don’t have the product required, the Attendant search for the days and hour of supply.
  4. The Attendant calls the Distributor, and the Distributor come to the warehouse.
  5.  The Distributor sells the number of products needed, and the Attendant buys them.
  6. The Attendant update the system with the new quantity of products, and closes the system.

In this case we achieved the goal for check the availability of a product, in the case we have the product needed we achieved the goal, this is what a use case describe, the processes of achieving specific goals, and for an specific goal we have conditionals that can help us to create new use cases in specific situations, and that is why i needed a diagram to see the this goals without entering in details, but when we describe the use case we need to enter in details as i did in the example.