RE: Use Cases & Requirements, Straw Man 1

[Hal Lockhart <hal.lockhart@entegrity.com>]

I am not very knowledgable about UML, but it seems to me that the current
docment is misusing UML.

My first reaction was that the diagrams would be much easier to understand
if the arcs had arrows. So I went over to the OMG Web site and looked at:

http://cgi.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?omg/2000-11-01

Lo and behold, the use case diagrams are not supposed to have arrows. Then I
noticed that each arc (and balloon) represents one use case. This is not the
case in our document, where the whole diagram is one use case and each arc
is one step.

Next I noticed a note that said "details of a use case can be shown with an
Interaction Diagram." So I took a look at:

http://cgi.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?omg/2000-11-02

And sure enough, Interaction Diagrams do have arrows and look a lot like
protocol exchange diagrams.

Perhaps some UML experts can correct me, but it looks to me like we should
be using Interaction Diagrams to document our use cases.

Hal