USE CASE PATTERNS
LIWU LI · International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2002
A use case represents a unit of the functionality specification of a system. Industrial object-oriented projects have applied use cases to capture user requirements. Use cases can be used throughout the whole process of object-oriented software development [14]. But, the problem of how to write use cases is still puzzling even software experts [6]. It reflects the lack of a systematic approach to capturing use cases. The set of use cases in a use case model is unstructured regarding the structure of the problem addressed by an application. This paper presents a notion of a use case pattern and proposes using a use case pattern to guide use case capturing. A use case pattern encodes reusable knowledge on the structure and function of a specific class of applications. It guides the work of use case gathering. We illustrate the approach to use case modeling with several use case patterns.