Jaison
Jaison

Reputation: 11

Conditional Flow in Use Cases

I am in the process of writing use cases for a website

I would like to know whether conditional flow can be incorporated in websites

Eg: Payment Success- Failure

Or should it be documented as Activity or state diagranm?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1308

Answers (2)

Nanette Holkestad
Nanette Holkestad

Reputation: 79

As mentioned, payment success would be your main path. Payment failure, as in the user's credit card was declined, is an acceptable outcome and should have an alternate path.

If the payment fails because of something like network connection issues, that would be a exception and handled accordingly. (I've always treated exception paths as a type of alternate path.)

Upvotes: 0

Gabriel Ščerbák
Gabriel Ščerbák

Reputation: 18560

Use Case descriptions, as mentioned in another answer, should most importantly cover the successful use cases of the system. However, it is also important to mention some of the special cases, in which system and actor should interact differently. Be warned, it is important to identify special conditions related to the use of the system, not technical details and rather than describing the decision logic, you should describe the special conditions. Alistair Cockburn in Writing effective Use Cases uses extensions of use cases to describe those scenarios as branches (with pre- and post-conditions) from the main scenario, with possible merge. Other experts use alternative flows for the same use case description. If you are truly after capturing the algorithmic logic, your idea of considering activity or state diagrams is a better choice.

Upvotes: 1

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