CSC/ECE 517 Summer 2008/wiki2 4 acmoore2

Use cases. There are even more pages on the Web on use cases than on MVC. If someone wants to learn about them, what should (s)he do? Look at the first few hits in Google? I expect we can do better than that. Write a review of the use-case sites on the Web. Which are best for learning about the concept? Which have the most instructive examples? Which teach advanced concepts that are not apparent in perusing most use-case sites? Read at least several dozen pages before deciding how to organize your overview.

Introduction

Use cases have become an integral part in the development of not only software engineering but system engineering. Wikipedia defines use cases in the following way:

A use case is a description of a system's behaviour as it responds
to a request that originates from outside of that system.

Use cases involve actors, starting with a primary actor which initiates an interaction with the system which leads to interacting with all other actors.

This is a pretty straight forward explanation of what a use case is but there is so much more information available on the world wide web regarding this subject. However, with the cluttered nature of the web, acturate, reliable and informative information is hard to come by.

Through this article I will discuss and review the best websites for use case education on the web. While some were easy to find, through www.google.com, for examples, others with perhaps even more thorough information were harder to find.