I had the opportunity to listen to an argument on why a project does not use a case tool. The main reasoning went along the line that there is no need for it, because Visio is just as good to create the neccessary diagrams.
Apart from the fact that even Visio was not used optimally, I think the whole argument against the case tool missed the point.

I think the Case Tool’s strenght is not the ability to draw nice diagrams and such, but the resulting documents – among many others. I just stress documentation now for a given reason.

On this project as it happened, there were several people gathering requirements, writing specifications, producing written documents and diagrams, sheets and sheets of data. The only problem was that these documents were not uniform. The style of numbering was different, the layout of the tables were not the same, and all the small things. Diagrams were created in Visio, and as noone set up a mandatory stencil for the project, the diagrams had some small differences in appearance.

What advantage a Case tool would provide to the project? Well, first of all, in a case tool everyone uses the same set of elements for the diagram. The information is entered into well defined places. And the resulting documents are generated by the tool, thus every single one would result in the same layout, font types, headings, ordering of the data, text and graphical thingies, following the same numbering conventions.

All in all, a case tool would have provided the project with a set of uniform documents, without the project members hunting for small errors, like using a ‘-’ instead of a ‘.’ and so on.

And then, we did not even go into the wonders of tracing between different parts of the documents and deliverables throughout the project lifecycle.

So, does it worth to invest into a case tool? If you just use it as a glorified diagram drawing application, then no way. But if you spend 5 minutes to look at what other values it has, then certainly. And you don’t have to get the most costly one. Sparxsystem’s Enterprise Architect is more than adequate if you are just start to learn it. And you can get one from 135USD, which is definitely cheap.

NOTE: I know, that with some tweaking and adding Data fields to shapes, you can set up some elaborate documentation even with Visio. I just think it is too much hassle. Visio has it’s uses, but can not – and is not intended to – replace case tools.