Useful Use Cases

Requirements elicitation and representation is always difficult, especially when the results need to be understood by two potentially diverse populations: the stakeholders (users, management, customers, ...) and the architects, designers and developers of the system. Use cases, emphasizing scenarios, are a great middle ground for representing large hunks of the requirements in a style that is both understandable to the stakeholders and specific enough for the technical community charged with architecting, designing and implementing them.

Use cases were introduced by Ivar Jacobson in his book, Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach, ISBN:0201544350. However, if you are not ready to purchase the book for $60, a great free resource on Use Cases is Rebecca Wirfs-Brock's OOPSLA 2002 tutorial, The Art of Writing Use Cases. You can download a copy of it here. Wirfs-Brock's site is an excellent resource for many OO requirements, design and architecture topics. Definitely worth browsing.

If any one has had experience using Use Cases or knows of further resources, I would appreciate it if you would add a comment. Later.

On error handling

In my classes I emphasize that it is important to provide adequate error handling in your code, but I also admit it is a real pain to do and one of my least favorite coding tasks.

Greg Horvath, CS565-'03, sent me a url to an article by Andrei Alexandrescu and Petru Marginean on Enforcements in the C/C++ Users Journal, http://www.cuj.com/documents/s=8250/cujcexp2106alexandr/. Andrei also is author of Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied, a very popular C++ patterns book, that Greg recommended in class. Getting back to enforcements, they are on the fly condition verifiers. The article is really well done, providing code and examples of using enforcements. Their short discussion of architectural patterns, design patterns and idioms alone is worth visiting the url. It is a companion to a previous article on assertions which is on my queue to read between terms.

I'd like to again thank Greg for the recommendation and encourage all of you to suggest articles and books to read that can be shared on the blog.

I also would like to thank folks for commenting on current blog entries, keep the dialog going! Later.