A roundup of the latest object-oriented products on the market.
2001 LISTING OF OBJECT TECHNOLOGY BOOKS & MULTIMEDIA
<FONT FACE="arial,helvetica" SIZE=2>While our experts have made their recommendations, there is still a need to provide the <I>Journal of Object-Oriented Programming's</I> readers with a comprehensive, categorized list. This updated bibliography includes more than 550 books and multimedia published from 1999 to the present. Suggestions, comments, and additions should be sent to Heather Darcy at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A>.<P>
<I>Compiled by Heather Darcy</I></FONT><P>
Use cases have proved to be effective in many areas of software development, including requirements gathering, object identification, test case generation, and user manual documentation. A new application of use cases is presented here: the verification of software specifications, prior to implementation. Use-case trees show a new view of the system and, constructed from the state-transition models of object-oriented specifications, can be used to verify the system specification for correctness. Paths from the root of the tree to leaf nodes correspond to use-case scenarios, and there should be no more paths in the tree than there are scenarios.
The use-case tree has another useful function in that it provides a new "global" view of a system. This is similar to a flowchart, which can prove to be useful for project managers, users, etc. who may require an overall picture of the system and rapid knowledge of the various paths the system can take.
Finally, the use-case tree could be incorporated quite comfortably into the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as it is based on existing formalisms (use cases and state transition models).