Summary

Use Case Analysis provides an initial, high-level definition of how internal elements interact in order to satisfy the system's functional requirements and how they relate to each other statically. This is a fundamental activity on the way to design and development.

Use Case Analysis is supported via sequence diagrams. Instead of showing the interaction between actors and a monolithic system, the system is split into analysis level objects. The responsibilities of the system are divided among the analysis level objects, which are referred to as boundary, control, and entity objects, to achieve a finer grained sequence diagram. Collaboration diagrams are another aid in such analysis.

Once the dynamic behavior has been captured in the form of sequence diagrams and collaboration diagrams, class diagrams can be developed to capture the static relationships between the various elements participating in fulfilling the use case.

Packaging provides a convenient mechanism for managing complexity and allotment of team effort. Another critical aspect where packaging can be leveraged deals with understanding the impact of changes in the project via dependency analysis.