Question

In all practical software modeling projects, the Actors are identified first, then, by querying the Actors in terms of how they will use the system, the Use cases are identified and documented. Identification and documentation of Use cases leads to further identification of potential Actors and subsequent Use cases. Thus we find that Actors are the most important and the very first modeling element to capture requirements.

Please comment, based on your understanding and your experience, why Actors are so important for successful Software Engineering. Also, comment on what would happen, and used to happen, when software solutions were built without any consideration to the Actors.

Answer 1

Yes, it is true that actors play a very crucial role in software engineering. It helps to identify the use cases. All of our use cases are basically dependent upon the actors which are taking part in the use case. Thus it is very mandatory to understand the limitations and capabilities of the actors.

Because our use case will be totally dependent on the actors and actors are the one which interacts with the subject and it is the one which exchanges the data with the subject.

Thus for the above reasons, actors are very crucial for software engineering use cases.

Thanks