Writing Effective Use Cases

More and more people are writing use cases, for behavioral requirements, for software

systems or to describe business processes. It all seems easy enough—just write

about using the system. But, faced with writing, one suddenly confronts the question,

“Exactly what am I supposed to write—how much, how little, what details?” That

turns out to be a difficult question to answer. The problem is that writing use cases is

fundamentally an exercise in writing prose essays, with all the difficulties in articulating

good

that comes with prose writing in general. It is hard enough to say what a

good use case looks like, but we really want to know something harder: how to write

them so they will come out being good.