Use Cases: The Business Analyst’s Best Friend

Use cases are a powerful requirements elicitation and analysis tool that have unfortunately fallen out of favor. Use them anyway!

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I like use cases. There, I said it, and I’m not sorry. Use cases have fallen out of fashion in recent years, being largely replaced by user stories on agile projects. The two techniques can coexist and complement each other, however.

Use cases offer several advantages that user stories lack. This article describes some of the many benefits that use cases can provide and why every business analyst (BA), product owner (PO), and software development team should include them in their tool kit.

What’s a Use Case?

This definition comes from the inventor of use cases, Ivar Jacobson: “A use case is all the ways of using a system to achieve a particular goal for a particular user.” This concise definition includes three important ideas:

1. Focusing on goals that a user has in mind when using a product.
2. Recognizing that there are multiple classes of users, each of which might have different use cases that the BA or PO must elicit, understand, and address.
3. Indicating that there can be multiple related…