Use cases have never been this easy to understand -- or this easy to create! In Writing Effective Use Cases, Alistair Cockburn offers a hands-on, soup-to-nuts guide to use case development, based on the proven concepts he has refined through years of research, development, and seminar presentations. Cockburn begins by answering the most basic questions facing anyone interested in use cases: "What does a use case look like? When do I write one?" Next, he introduces each key element of use cases: actors, stakeholders, design scope, goal levels, scenarios, and more. Writing Effective Use Cases contains detailed guidelines, formats, and project standards for creating use cases -- as well as a detailed chapter on style, containing specific do's and don'ts. Cockburn shows how use cases fit together with requirements gathering, business processing reengineering, and other key issues facing software professionals. The book includes practice exercises with solutions, as well as a detailed appendix on how to use these techniques with UML. For all application developers, object technology practitioners, software system designers, architects, and analysts.

Alistair Cockburn是用例方面的一位著名专家。他是Humans and Technology公司的资深顾问，在那里他负责帮助客户在面向对象项目上获得成功。他具有20多年的项目管理经验，曾在许多保险、零售和电子商务公司以及一些大型企业（例如挪威中央银行和IBM公司）主持软、硬件开发项目。

王雷，男，1969年生，博士。北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程系副教授，从事软件工程、过程工程和系统软件等方面的研究工作。曾获部级科技进步二等奖、三等奖各一项。

张莉，女，1968年生，博士。北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程系教授，软件工程研究所副所长。主要从事软件工程、过程工程、企业/软件建模等的研究。1996年博士学位论文被评为北京计算机学会第三届博士优秀学位论文，1998～2000年任863/CIMS石化行业专家组成员，2001年入选北京市科技新星计划，2001年获得“中创软件人才奖”，成为该年度全国获此殊荣的三人之一。