Thursday, 11 December 2008

Hairdressers use cases - issue resolved

In my Hairdressers use cases I had a Customer actor linked to the use case Request Appointment. I drew this outside the system boundary as I didn't see this as something happening inside the system. But without the Customer the use case isn't started, so it didn't seem correct to exclude it from the diagram either.

So I looked up use cases in a few books and found some useful information in A Student Guide to Object Oriented Development by Britton & Doake. I thought I'd include some of it here in case others are having the same worry:

the initiating actor is the one who starts off the sequence of events i.e. initiates the use case. The rest of the actors involved in the use case are participating actors. The most important actor is the one known as the beneficiary, i.e. the one who gets the benefit from the use case

Although it seems to be acceptable to include initiating actors in a model, in the book they say that the actors shown are the ones who physically use the system. I've included the initiator here to be consistent with my original versions, but in future I'll be doing the same as in the book.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Absolutely right - the use case describes distinct interactions with the system - not individuals. The manager performing other duties is enacting another use case