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Use Cases: Patterns and Blueprints Review by uniq

Solid help for real-life situations

This is a very informative, precise, and dense book. The authors uncover misconceptions and discuss real-life examples. They carefully and convincingly direct us to the best practices in the field. Every recommendation, pattern, and anti-pattern is supported by a detailed explanation of the tradeoffs and even suggestion of a "Way Out", i.e. how to migrate from an anti-pattern. The patterns are not contrived and are inspired by real-life cases: access control, CRUD, login/logout, multiple actors, optional service, use case squence, and others.

I recommend this volume to everyone who works closely with requirements, not just to those who creates them. This includes business and requirements analysts, architects, designers, and, of course, quality assurance practitioners: when the entire project team is familiar with how to create, maintain, and interpret use cases, the chances for success are so much higher.

On a slightly negative side the language feels a bit stiff, lacking elegance. Still unambiguous in the technical sense, some sentences are a bit hard to read and should have been re-written for better readability. For example, on page 89 we read "However, would not one extend relationship referencing one extension point, which in its turn references all these locations, also do the trick?", or on page 63 ("Otherwise, there is a risk that later descriptions will have to be made according to an include relationship that actually should not have been available because later descriptions show that the flows have precious little in common."), or on page 64 ("Note that the end section of an inclusion use case explicitly states which information is available in the base use case after the inclusion -- that is, the result of the included flow, if any, because this is important information when reusing this use case ").