Patterns for Effective Use Cases

Use cases have become a very popular requirements-gathering technique, yet many developers struggle when faced with writing them. They grasp the basic concepts, but find that writing effective use cases turns out to be more difficult than they expected. One factor contributing to this difficulty is that the community lacks objective criteria for judging the quality of use cases. This new book articulates the qualities of effective use cases by applying the proven patterns concept of development to this requirements-gathering technique. The authors present a catalog of thirty-six patterns that help the reader become proficient at judging the quality of their (and other's) patterns. These patterns represent solutions to recurring problems that application developers have faced in writing use cases. Each pattern is presented with examples that help the reader understand the benefit of the pattern, and just as importantly, the consequences of ignoring its proper use.

Steve Adolph is a consultant with WSA Consulting, Inc., where he is responsible for helping clients develop their software teams to meet new challenges. He has been an inspirational mentor and consultant to a variety of software companies and has spoken at numerous seminars and workshops on the topics of the software development process, use cases, software design, UML, and patterns. His twenty years of software development experience span the areas of cellular telephone, mobile dispatch, railway signaling, direct-to-plate printing, and e-commerce systems in both large and small organizations. He is also the author of numerous software-development case studies and articles.

Paul Bramble is a Senior Software Engineer with Emperative, Inc., where he specializes in Object-Oriented software development. He has been using, researching, and writing about use cases and patterns since 1994. He has more than twenty years of software development experience and has worked for several different organizations in the areas of telecommunications, avionics, operating systems, mainframe computer manufacturing, and e-commerce. Paul is a Colorado native, and received his MS degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 1989, designing portions of an Object-Oriented distributed operating system for his master's thesis.

Andy Pols is founder of, and senior consultant at, Pols Consulting Limited in the UK, where he is responsible for training and mentoring in the areas of project management, use cases, and Object-Oriented development. He first wrote use cases while working at Ericsson and has since worked on numerous projects in the areas of manufacturing, clinical trials, revenue management, retail, consumer electronics, banking, and e-commerce. Andy lives in London and hosts the Use Case Zone (http://www.pols.co.uk/usecasezone).