Use Case Maker

Dedicated to software developers and technical writers, Use Case Maker is a free and open-source tool that facilitates a simple and approachable environment for creating, managing and examining use cases and actors.

After a fast setup operation that shouldn't give you any trouble, you are greeted by a standard window with a classical structure, where you can add new packages in the model you're currently working on and seamlessly explore them, as well as create actors and use cases.

General information revolves around the model identifier, owner package, model name, author company, release and date of creation. You can define attributes when it comes to the model description, notes and file attachments, indicate the requirements, or put together the glossary and stakeholders.

For actors you can view identifiers and owner packages, as well as edit names, goals, descriptions, notes and related documents. As far as use cases are concerned, you can specify pre- and post-conditions, the trigger event (external, temporal or internal), trigger description, actors, priority, level (summary, user or subfunction), complexity, status, implementation (e.g. scheduled, completed, deferred), assigned to, release, open issues, flow of events, prose and history.

Model projects can be saved to file and later resumed. It's possible to search for keywords and replace them with something else, remove use cases, change the order of the elements, and export the model to HTML, RTF, PDF or XML format. Text can cut, copied and pasted.

Unsurprisingly, the program had minimal impact on computer performance in our tests, running on low CPU and RAM. No error dialogs popped up, and it didn't hang or crash. Although it's not wrapped up in the most attractive interface, Use Case Maker is a clear-cut software application that focuses on the technical aspect for creating models with use cases and actors.