Use Case and User Interface Patterns for Data Oriented Applications

Use case driven software development starts, in general, with abstract problem domain descriptions of how the users see themselves using the system being developed, and involves a series of iterative refinement steps that incrementally add detail to the use case model, bringing those descriptions to the solution domain. Use cases involve interactions between human actors and the system state. These interactions are held within interaction spaces, which are modeled through a user interface model. Business applications are in general data-driven, comprising a set of typical functions that the users can make on the system. When a use case driven approach is used to develop data-oriented applications those typical functions pop-up as use case patterns, and their interactions occur within a set of user interface patterns. This paper presents a set of use case patterns and the corresponding user interface patterns typically found in data-oriented business applications. For that, a user interface metamodel and corresponding concrete user interface modeling language are also proposed.