In 1987, Ivar Jacobson presented the first article on use cases at the OOPSLA'87 conference.

[1] He
described how this technique was used at Ericsson to capture and specify requirements of a system
using textual, structural, and visual modeling techniques to drive object oriented analysis and design.[2]
Originally he had used the terms usage scenarios and usage case – the latter a direct translation of his
Swedish term användningsfall – but found that neither of these terms sounded natural in English, and
eventually he settled on use case.[3]

In 1992 he co-authored the book Object-Oriented Software Engineering - A Use Case Driven Approach,
[4] which laid the foundation of the OOSE system engineering method and helped to popularize use
cases for capturing functional requirements, especially in software development. In 1994 he published a
book about use cases and object-oriented techniques applied to business models and business process
reengineering.[5]

At the same time, Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh worked at unifying their object-oriented analysis
and design methods, the Booch method and Object Modeling Technique (OMT) respectively. In 1995 Ivar
Jacobson joined them and together they created the Unified Modelling Language (UML), which includes
use case modeling. UML was standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG) in 1997.[6]
Jacobson, Booch and Rumbaugh also worked on a refinement of the Objectory software development
process. The resulting Unified Process was published in 1999 and promoted a use case driven approach.
[7]

Since then, many authors have contributed to the development of the technique, notably: Larry
Constantine developed in 1995, in the context of usage-centered design, so called "essential use-cases"
that aim to describe user intents rather than sequences of actions or scenarios which might constrain or
bias the design of user interface;[8] Alistair Cockburn published in 2000 a goal-oriented use case practice
based on text narratives and tabular specifications;[9] Kurt Bittner and Ian Spence developed in 2002
advanced practices for analyzing functional requirements with use cases;[10] Dean Leffingwell and Don
Widrig proposed to apply use cases to change management and stakeholder communication activities;
[11] Gunnar Overgaard proposed in 2004 to extend the principles of design patterns to use cases.[12]

In 2011, Jacobson published with Ian Spence and Kurt Bittner the ebook Use Case 2.0 to adapt the
technique to an agile context, enriching it with incremental use case "slices", and promoting its use
across the full development lifecycle[13] after having presented the renewed approach at the annual
IIBA conference.[14][15]
General principle