Are Themes and Use Cases the Same
Pavol Michalco · 2010
Theme/Doc and use cases are two prominent approaches to aspect-oriented analysis. They have been developed in- dependently and up to now, there have been no attempts to analyze how they are connected to each other. This paper explores the extent to what themes and use cases can be considered the same by developing a process of the transformation of themes into use cases and the reverse one. Extensive similarities have been revealed between themes and use cases with respect to expressing aspect- oriented decomposition, relationship to functional decom- position, and generalization. Main differences lie in the way themes and use cases are described, naming conven- tion, lack of actors in themes, and lower level character of some themes. Despite the differences, most of the themes can be transformed directly into use cases and vice versa with a quite straightforward derivation of the relation- ships among them.