Applying Use Case Driven Object Modeling with UML: An Annotated e-Commerce Example

Chapter 3. Use Case Modeling

This chapter addresses a fundamental question that every development effort must ask: What are the users of the system trying to do? We’re going to focus our efforts on trying to capture our users’ actions, and the associated system responses, in great detail because the software behavior is dictated by the user requirements. In other words, what we need the software to do depends on how the users are accessing it and what the users are trying to do. This often relates to screens and user interfaces.

Figure 3-1 shows where use case modeling resides within the “big picture” for the ICONIX process. As you can see, we think it’s a good idea to use prototypes to help define the use cases. And, we do our use ...