Developing Enterprise Java Applications with J2EE™ and UML

Summary

Properly capturing requirements is essential to a system's success and its long-term viability. In the UML, use case modeling offers a simple yet powerful means of capturing your requirements.

In the use case model, actors are the primary instigators of use cases and represent entities outside the system. Use cases can be thought of as a sequence of steps required to achieve something useful to an actor. That is, a use case must yield something useful to the end user of the use case. Sequence diagrams and activity diagrams are useful for precisely identifying and understanding the behavior of a use case.