What is the difference between a scenario and a use case? When do you use each construct? Explain
with the help of 1-2 suitable examples.
From the provided reading materials, a Use Case is the detailed or a rough description of how a user will
use a particular system in the hope of solving a problem. A user here will be described as an actor, so a
use case can be said as a grouped scenarios with a common goal.
Example.
Let us take for example a case whereby we have a Point of Sale system in both sides we have a Cashier
and a customer both of them are actors in our system and the use case for the customer is to buy stuff
also to have a possibility of refund from a purchased system and for the cashier the use case is to
document the purchased item, be able to do a refund and be able to login to the system.
On the other hand a Scenario can be described as a sequence of steps that an actor of our system takes
to accomplish a given task.
Example
Back to our system of a Point of Sale, at the end of the month a cashier might want to see gross sales
that has been done throughout the month. In this case our actor uses the built-in export system to
create an excel copy of all the sales to keep track on whether they have made a profit or a loss. This is a
great example of use scenario that has a great description of why an actor might want to use our
system.
Reference
I. M. (n.d.). Software Engineering. Retrieved July 8, 2018, from
http://www.ece.rutgers.edu/~marsic/books/SE/book-SE_marsic.pdf
Difference between scenario and use-case. (n.d.). Retrieved July 8, 2018, from
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/347498/difference-between-scenario-and-
use-case
with the help of 1-2 suitable examples.
From the provided reading materials, a Use Case is the detailed or a rough description of how a user will
use a particular system in the hope of solving a problem. A user here will be described as an actor, so a
use case can be said as a grouped scenarios with a common goal.
Example.
Let us take for example a case whereby we have a Point of Sale system in both sides we have a Cashier
and a customer both of them are actors in our system and the use case for the customer is to buy stuff
also to have a possibility of refund from a purchased system and for the cashier the use case is to
document the purchased item, be able to do a refund and be able to login to the system.
On the other hand a Scenario can be described as a sequence of steps that an actor of our system takes
to accomplish a given task.
Example
Back to our system of a Point of Sale, at the end of the month a cashier might want to see gross sales
that has been done throughout the month. In this case our actor uses the built-in export system to
create an excel copy of all the sales to keep track on whether they have made a profit or a loss. This is a
great example of use scenario that has a great description of why an actor might want to use our
system.
Reference
I. M. (n.d.). Software Engineering. Retrieved July 8, 2018, from
http://www.ece.rutgers.edu/~marsic/books/SE/book-SE_marsic.pdf
Difference between scenario and use-case. (n.d.). Retrieved July 8, 2018, from
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/347498/difference-between-scenario-and-
use-case
