Writing Effective Use Cases

excellent book

Livre très riche en enseignements et plein de bon conseils.Je conseille chaque architecte informatique à l'avoir et mettre en pratique les "recettes" de ce livre.

Excellent book on usecase writing. I would recommend this to any one associated wih software application dev or business process analysis

The book provides a very effective methodology to collect and describe functional requirements.The presentation is very clear and reach of examples from real projects. It is possible to learn use cases since reading the first sections. The rest of the book is dedicated to in-depth analysis of some topics.

This is a top-notch book on Use Cases. I got it because I had to write Use Cases for a programming and configuration tool for a safety controller used with electric motor drives in industrial automation systems. This is a SIL3 safety-critical application.I disagree entirely with the two-star-awarding reviewer who calls Cockburn "naive". Indeed the great virtue of Cockburn's approach to Use Cases is that he keeps them simple. This is a major advantage in high-integrity systems where simplicity is the friend of reliability and safety. I also applaud Cockburn's evident disdain for using UML graphical notations for UCs. OO-methods are generally shunned in safety-critical systems as they are regarded as too imprecise (Indeed hardened practitioners in critical systems engineering often regard the use of UML/OO as a sign of limited competence.)Cockburn is IMO absolutely right in saying that UCs are an essentially textual form. Sooner or later the developers of MIS-type systems will realise that those of us who have been doing hard software engineering (in this reviewer's case for over 40 years) actually have a far clearer idea of the kinds of specification formalisms that work when things absolutely have to be right. And when the OO fad has finally died, I reckon Cockburn's book will still be in print because it does not shackle itself to the UML/OO bandwagon.IMO, this book is exceptionally well-written and down-to-earth. It is, I think, a solid and welcome contribution to the literature on specification.