Abstract
Use case diagrams are one of the key concepts in the Unified Modeling Language, but their semantics and notation have some gaps that lead to frequent misunderstandings among practitioners, even about very basic questions. In this paper we address some issues regarding the relationships in which use cases may take part. The Include and Extend relationships between two use cases have presently an inconsistent definition, since they are represented as stereotyped dependencies, but they are not true dependencies in the metamodel. Besides, the direction of the dependency arrow in the Extend relationship can be misleading, unnatural and difficult to understand for the common practitioner. Finally, we show also some conceptual problems regarding the included or extending use cases, which in our opinion are not true use cases.
A previous version of this paper contained a Section on the relationships between use cases and actors, but it had to be supressed due to space problems.
Whether they are dependencies, or not, is one of the main subjects of this paper.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Klaas van der Berg, Anthony J.H. Simons. “Control-Flow Semantics of Use Cases in UML”. Information and Software Technology, 41(10):651–659, July 1999.
Grady Booch, James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson. The Unified Modeling Language User Guide. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Donald Firesmith, Brian Henderson-Sellers, Ian Graham. The OPEN Modeling Language (OML) Reference Manual. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Martin Fowler, Alistair Cockburn, Ivan Jacobson, Bruce Anderson, Ian Graham. “Question Time! Abount Use Cases”, Proceeding of the 13th ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications-OOPSLA’98, October 18–22, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 33(10):226–229.
Ivar Jacobson, M. Christerson, P. Jonsson, G. Övergaard, Object-Oriented Software Engineering: a Use Case Driven Approach, Addison Wesley, 1992.
Pierre Metz. “Against Use Case Interleaving”, The Fourth International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language-UML’2001, October 1–5, 2001, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2185, pp. 472–486.
Pierre Metz. Personal communications to the authors, October 28th and December 16th, 2001.
Joaquin Miller. Post to the Precise UML Group Mailing List (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/puml/), January 12th, 2002.
Object Management Group. Unified Modeling Language Specification, Version 1.4, September 2001 (Version 1.3, June 1999).
Rational Software Corporation, Unified Modeling Language Semantics, Version 1.1, September 1997.
Rational Software Corporation, Unified Modeling Language Notation Guide, Version 1.1, September 1997.
James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch. The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Anthony J. H. Simons. “Use cases considered harmful”, Proceedings of the 29th Conference on Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems-TOOLS Europe’99, June 7–10, 1999, Nancy, France. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1999, pp. 194–203.
Anthony J. H. Simons, Ian Graham: “30 Things that go wrong in object modelling with UML 1.3”, chapter 17 in Kilov, H., Rumpe, B., Simmonds, I. (eds.): Behavioral Specifications of Businesses and Systems. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, 237–257.
Anthony J. H. Simons. Personal communication to the authors, December 5th, 2001.
Anthony J. H. Simons. Post to the Precise UML Group Mailing List (http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/puml/), January 31st, 2002.
Perdita Stevens, Rob Pooley. Using UML: Software Engineering with Objects and Components. Addison-Wesley, 2000.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Génova, G., Llorens, J., Quintana, V. (2002). Digging into Use Case Relationships. In: Jézéquel, JM., Hussmann, H., Cook, S. (eds) ≪UML≫ 2002 — The Unified Modeling Language. UML 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2460. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45800-X_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45800-X_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44254-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45800-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive