A Taxonomy of Use Case Errors

First, the definition. A use case describes an actor's interaction with a system to create business value. There are three parts: Actor, Interaction and Business Value.

  1. Not Interactive.

1.1. The use case is just features and technical attributes with no actor interaction expressed.

1.2. The use case is …

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The Ubiquitous Object

Objects are everywhere.

Weirdly, some people can't see them. I guess they live in a rarified, HP Lovecraftian world of pure action inhabited by amorphous things that can't be properly called "beings" but rather "doings" because they're pure activity with no existence.

Read "Hypnos". "They were sensations, yet within them …

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The curse of procedural design

After reverse engineering procedural code in C, VB or even Python, I'm finding that procedural programming inevitably leads to bad, bad code-rot.

Consider some of the common design patterns.

Strategy. Confronted with alternative strategy choices, a purely procedural code solution is either

  • If-statements everywhere the strategy is involved.
  • Block comments …
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Code Deletion

A joyous milestone today. Removed much of our pre-Piston RESTful web services code.

We started with the Django-REST Interface. While nice, it imposed a number of restrictions that were onerous. In particular, we have a lot of non-model responses. They're model-like data that we serialize to be compatible with …

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Where is Python Used? (Update)

This is a fair-to-partly silly question that shows up on places like StackOverflow once in a while.

Python is used widely and pretty heavily.

It's a built-in feature to many operating systems in common use. The exception, of course, is Windows.

I just found out -- the hard way -- that Python …

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