Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Other Reviews

Ivar Jacobson pioneered the use of Scenarios in the Object-Oriented Software community, and single-handedly introduced the Use Case to the world. Use Cases have been advocated by many other authors, notably Alistair Cockburn, filling in the gaps left by Jacobson. But it was this book that for many people first showed the advantages of a scenario approach, and started the fashion for Use Cases. Jacobson's Objectory method has been subsumed in the Rational Unified Process (RUP), to which it lent many ideas and most distinctively the Use Case diagram with its stickmen and bubbles.

The book is, like all pioneering ventures, a little unbalanced -- scenarios don't do everything; they are very helpful for telling the story of what a system ought to do, but they don't necessarily capture all the constraints, interfaces, and non-functional requirements that may come from quite different stakeholders than Jacobson's "Actors". But as a passionate plea for standing back from software and looking at the big picture (not to mention the history of software engineering), this book is important.

© Ian Alexander 2004