Making Sense of Use Cases

An overview of the goals and contents of the course

An introduction to a sample problem we'll use throughout the course. We'll come back to this example over and over, as we go through the different concepts and ideas in the class. We'll use it for exercises as well, to tie all of the ideas together.

This lecture is an introduction to use cases. We'll look in detail at the definition of the term "use case" and talk about the value a use case provides. We'll see some examples and talk about how we should (and shouldn't!) name use cases.

We'll talk about the process we follow to find use cases in a project, starting with the project's Vision and features. Then we'll put this into practice by going through our sample project and identifying use cases for that project.

In this session, we'll take a closer look at actors. We'll look closely at the definition of the term "actor", and talk about different types of actors, how to find them, and how to name them.

Practice the skills you just learned by identifying actors and use cases in a sample project.

This is our solution to the exercise, including the actors and use cases we found.

A picture can be worth a thousand words, and a use case diagram can help a team better visualize and understand use cases, actors, and their relationships. In this session, we'll take a closer look at this diagram, including the UML notation for actors, use cases, and associations.

This session builds on the last, adding Include and Extend relationships to our use case diagrams. We can use these relationships to model reusable functionality in a system. We'll talk about how and when we might want to use them, the differences between Includes and Extends, and the UML notation for each one.

In this session, we'll go through one final type of relationship on a use case diagram - a generalization relationship between actors. We can use generalizations to model actors with some commonality.

It's important to recognize things not to do in a use case diagram. In this session, we'll go through some common mistakes in use case modeling, and talk about better approaches and solutions.

This session will tie all of the use case diagram discussions together. We'll walk through our example project and talk about how we build a use case diagram for that project.

Practice building a use case diagram by crtating one for teh actors and use cases you identified in the previous exercise.

Our solution to the use case diagram exercise. We'll walk through the use case diagram we put together for our actors and use cases.

The use case specification is a document that gives us requirements and other details for a use case. In this session, we'll take a close look at this document and its contents, format, and use in a project. We'll walk through each of the sections of the document, including the brief description, preconditions, basic flow of events, alternate flow of events, and post-conditions, and talk about what belongs in each section.

Practice the skills you just learned by writing a use case specification for one of your use cases.

We'll walk through the use case specificqation we wrote for one of our use cases.

An activity diagram is an optional, but very useful, addition to a use case specification. It can help the team better visualize the flow through the use case. In this session, we'll talk about this UML diagram and the notation we use.

Practice this UML skill by building an activity diagram for your use case.

Our solution to the activity diagram exercise. We'll walk through the diagram we put together for our use case.

In this session, we'll talk about how use cases fit into a typical software development life cycle. In particular, we'll look at how use cases evolve through an iterative approach.

Use cases are a great way to capture functional requirements, but here we'll explore ways to capture non-functional requirements as well.