Use cases are the product of the methodology developed and used by Ivar Jacobson and documented in the book Object-Oriented Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1992).
This text describes an entire development method based on requirements from the user's view of the system.
Jacobson has now joined Jim Rumbaugh and Grady Booch at Rational Software, where he is contributing to the development of the UML.
His book on reuse strategies is titled Software Reuse, Architecture, Process, and Organization for Business Success (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997).

In 1986, Ivar Jacobson first formulated visual modeling techniques for specifying use cases. In 1992 his co-authored book "Object-Oriented Software Engineering - A Use Case Driven Approach" helped to popularize the technique for capturing functional requirements, especially in software development. Originally he had used the terms usage scenarios and usage case, the latter a direct translation of his Swedish term anvaendningsfall, but found that neither of these terms sounded natural in English, and eventually he settled on use case.
Since then, other experts have also contributed a great deal to the technique, notably Alistair Cockburn, Larry Constantine, Dean Leffingwell, and Kurt Bittner.
In 2011, Jacobson published an update to his work, called Use Case 2.0, with the intention of incorporating many of his practical experiences of applying use cases since the original inception of the concept.