Nicholas Van Weerdenburg
12/2/2004 4:41:00 AM
Cockburn is a great writer, and it's a totally awesome book. I quite
like his treatment of use cases- and his writing is on par with Martin
Fowler, the Pragmatic Programmers, and so on. It's one of top 10
software books I've ever read. I've probably bought six or seven copies
for clients I've worked with.
Even though Ivar Jacobsen invented use cases, Rational has done little
but make them impossible to use because of their tool agenda. Cockburn
fixes that nicely. And in the middle of the billions of pages of RUP
(Rational Unified Process) documentation, you'll actually find
references to Cockburn.
Cockburn largely focuses on 1. use cases as text- essentially requiring
the same effort and skills as a well written essay, 2. the driving
forces behind them (user contracts, should be understood by users, user
goals, stakeholder goals, business processes), and 3. use case
structuring, granularity, grammer, and the other difficult aspects of
use cases.
He also nicely slams the stick men diagrams, tool-infatuation, and heavy
methodology. He has some great insight into traceability from business
anaylsis through software analysis (not worth the pain and
suffering...don't try to link business use cases directly through system
uses cases) and strategies for handling software and business use cases
modeling (preference to focus on the system, and draw out the business
use cases as necessary to fill out the picture).
I still think there are gaps though. It is a small book, and doesn't
cover trade-offs imposed by use cases in different problem domains and
architectures. It also doesn't really address scaling use cases to large
systems, or to enterprise systems that have a significant pre-existing
context to work from (e.g. SAP).
Has anyone read his "Use Case Patterns" book? I have it, but haven't
gotten to it yet.
Nick
Sascha Ebach wrote:
> Hi Yura, Lyle,
>
>> I've read a couple of books on use cases (did not read Alistair
>> Cockburn's book though) but started to actually write them only
>> after I've read "Use Case Modeling" by Kurt Bittner and
>> Ian Spence (ISBN : 0-201-70913-9).
>
>
> The thing is: After you are done with Cockburn you will not have to
> read any other books on use cases, if you are after a practical guide.
> He is very concise. It is a short book, nevertheless very complete if
> you do not need to dig deeper (for scientific purposes maybe, which
> Lyle clearly doesn't want to). But, like I have experienced lots of
> times before with book recommendations, YMMV.
>
> The feeling I had after I was finished was comparable to the feeling I
> had after Pickaxe 2. ("Damn, that is all I ever need to know about
> that to get started really well")
>