• Use cases can improve the user friendliness of your site or application.work after working image by Igor Nikolayev from Fotolia.com
  
  Use cases are utilized in software and web development to describe the different interactions that can take place between a user and a system or application. Because use cases focus on people and not the system itself, the system needs are brought to light early on, which opens up a number of benefits throughout the product development process.
  
  

Product Discovery

• Defining use cases early can help ensure that software development teams will build the right product. Even before requirements are defined, the process of developing use cases can uncover problem areas or behaviors that can be addressed with new software products or enhancements to existing products.
  
  

Requirements Definition

• Use cases are a natural steppingstone to defining functional requirements. By establishing a common understanding about how a user will interact with the new product, it becomes much easier to describe how that product must work. For example, if you were building a new ATM interface, a use case might describe a scenario in which a Spanish-speaking person will use the ATM to withdraw cash. A requirement to support that use case would be that the system must display instructions in Spanish.
  
  

Development

• Use cases can help simplify the software development process. When requirements are aligned with use cases, it becomes easier to organize engineering resources and minimize complexity, allowing developers to focus on one specific usage at a time.
  
  

Testing

• Another benefit of use cases is that it helps identify what might go wrong during a user interaction. Because desired outcomes are clearly described in the use cases, it is easier to establish test criteria. Test cases can be built to match each individual use case, making them easy to validate.
  
  

Communications

• Whether a use case has been documented using narrative text or a diagram, it should be easily understood by stakeholders at all levels, including executives, marketers and the users themselves, not just software engineers. This allows product owners and project managers to communicate more effectively, include stakeholders early in the process and get buy-in from key decision-makers. It creates a shared vision of the problem to be addressed and bridges the gap between those who understand the problem and those who know how to build the solution.