Describing business processes with use cases

Abstract

Business processes can be described with diagrams, e.g. BPMN diagrams, or as text. Use cases are a text-based notation. They are semiformal: a business process is expressed as a sequence of steps and each step is presented in a natural language. In the paper two experiments are described that aimed at comparison of diagrambased and text-based notation. Moreover, we describe some extensions to use cases which we have found interesting when working on description of business processes based on use cases. Those extensions, among others, allow to describe actor metamorphosis and specify steps which must be performed before the main scenario is executed. The ideas described in the paper have been incorporated into UC Workbench – a tool supporting editing and animation of use-case-based models.