Role of Use Cases in Testing!

Use Cases basically describe how the user(s) will interact on your website. They describe the sequence of interactions between the user and website, without specifying the user interface.

The Diagram of use case involves

• Actor (which initiates the use case)
• Use Case

Each Use Case captures:

• The actor (user of website)
• The interaction (what does the user want to do?)
• The goal (user’s objective)

Parts of Use Cases:

A Use Case includes two main parts:

• The steps a user will take to accomplish a particular task on your site
• The way the website should respond to a user’s actions

A Use Case begins with a user’s goal and ends when that goal is accomplished.

Use Case Diagrams are used in almost every project. They are helpful in exposing requirements and planning the projects. During the initial stage of a project, most Use Cases should be defined. Use Cases are quite useful in understanding the functionality of the software as they help us in having a clear view of how the user can interact with the websites and we can have a clear idea of the product as well before even actually using it.

Use Cases basically reflect the functional requirements. Client provides the Use Case diagrams to the testing team (along with other requirements) during the early stages of testing cycle. The testing team understands the functionality by these Use Case diagrams and then uses them to create the test scenarios and test cases.

Each Use Case can have single or multiple test cases. In test cases we write the steps in accordance with the Use Case diagrams and it is essential that the steps should involve all the details about the way the user can interact with our website, otherwise the Use Cases won’t be necessary as we can use other diagrams like Sequence Diagrams and Class diagrams etc.

User perspective is also very important. Documentation of user will be very much easier with the Use Cases. Use Cases will help us getting the idea of what steps the user will perform and what will be the system’s behavior.

Benefits of Use Cases:

Three major benefits of Use Cases are:

• They help in capturing the system’s functional requirements from the users’ perspective.
• They involve users in the requirements-gathering process.
• They serve as the foundation for developing test cases.
• They are beneficial for both the developers and the testers in a way that the developers build the product according to the Use Cases and the testers write the test cases and test the product according to the steps involved in the Use Case diagrams.