Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

13.2. Online Application Walkthrough

Figure 13-1 shows the use-case diagram for the Within-a-Click online application. The points that follow provide an overview of each of the functions shown in the figure:

Figure 13.1. Figure 13-1

1. Create New Account — Users first create a new account by specifying their account details. The key user account information will include username, password, e-mail address, security question, and security question answer.

2. Activate Account — After users have created a new account, they will be sent a unique account Activation Key via e-mail, which they will use to activate their account. This is a pretty common pattern for validating a user's identity. Once their new accounts have been successfully activated, users will be automatically logged in to the system so that they can make use of the basic account management functionality.

3. Re-Request Activation Key — E-mail isn't guaranteed; I've personally had many occasions where I haven't received an e-mail for one reason or another. In some cases, e-mail can take a long time to arrive. Taking these situations into account and the fact that there's a real possibility that the Activation Key e-mail could be "lost in the ether," the system will provide users with the ability to directly re-request their account Activation Key.

4. Login — When users have an active account (it has been successfully activated), they ...