TY - JOUR A1 - Hirschfeld, Robert A1 - Perscheid, Michael A1 - Haupt, Michael T1 - Explicit use-case representation in object-oriented programming languages JF - ACM SIGPLAN notices N2 - Use-cases are considered an integral part of most contemporary development processes since they describe a software system's expected behavior from the perspective of its prospective users. However, the presence of and traceability to use-cases is increasingly lost in later more code-centric development activities. Use-cases, being well-encapsulated at the level of requirements descriptions, eventually lead to crosscutting concerns in system design and source code. Tracing which parts of the system contribute to which use-cases is therefore hard and so limits understandability. In this paper, we propose an approach to making use-cases first-class entities in both the programming language and the runtime environment. Having use-cases present in the code and the running system will allow developers, maintainers, and operators to easily associate their units of work with what matters to the users. We suggest the combination of use-cases, acceptance tests, and dynamic analysis to automatically associate source code with use-cases. We present UseCasePy, an implementation of our approach to use-case-centered development in Python, and its application to the Django Web framework. KW - design KW - languages KW - use-cases KW - separation of concerns KW - traceability Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1145/2168696.2047856 SN - 0362-1340 VL - 47 IS - 2 SP - 51 EP - 60 PB - Association for Computing Machinery CY - New York ER -