Essential Use Cases and Responsibility in Object-Oriented Development

Abstract

Essential use cases are abstract, lightweight, technology-free dialogues of user intention and system responsibility that effectively capture requirements for user interface design. We describe how essential use cases can also drive object-oriented development directly, without any intervening translation, and allowing user interface development and object-oriented development to proceed in parallel. Working with essential use cases yields some unexpected further benefits: the crucial common vocabulary of responsibilities lets designers trace directly from the essential use cases to the objects in their design.