Developing Applications with Java™ and UML

Finding the Pathways through Use-Cases

Before we can complete the project vision, we need to do more work: We need to find the various pathways through each use-case. We will identify three levels of pathways—primary, alternate, and exception—as well as present a use-case template to be used across the entire project.

Unfortunately, the authors of UML provided us little, if any, input on what goes inside of a use-case. The official UML notation, as maintained by the Object Management Group, ventures no further than describing the diagrammatic components. This is little help to the practitioner. In defense of the UML authors, how we choose to capture the detail of the use-case is subjective to some degree. So it is crucial that a template be agreed ...