Use cases have become an integral part of modeling software requirements, but many software developers are discovering that writing effective use cases is more difficult than they had anticipated. An understanding of the basic principles of use cases is not enough. Software developers need a source of objective criteria by which to judge quality and effectiveness.Patterns for Effective Use Cases provides this set of objective criteria. Written by experienced use case practitioners, this book fills a critical information gap by presenting a pattern language that contains over thirty patterns, providing simple, elegant, and proven solutions to the most common problems in use case development. These patterns distill and define the properties and characteristics of quality use cases. As such, they facilitate the development of original use cases and provide a diagnostic tool for evaluating existing ones.