Reaffirming the truth “actors are not essentially users”

Only to contextualise, Its all about Software Design or Development Methodology if you prefer. You might be wondering why would “actors not being essentially users” have to be reaffirmed! The answer is: If you miss a use case, you miss a requirement, if you miss a requirement, you fail. Why the failure matters? Because the Software design and techniques where brought to “reduce the risk” that software development process is exposed to. Why risk and not risks? Good question! At this point, I’m focusing on the product and not ON the whole atmosphere that involves the Software life-cicle.

What the product does is “solve the client’s problem”, this is what makes the product/system a solution. Whats going to interact with the system then? The users right? If you said “YES”, you definitely can’t stop reading this, because you are wrong. You would be right If I had asked “who is going to interact with the system”, as I asked “what” you are wrong. Guess why?? The system interacts with actors. YES:

Users are actors, but actos are not users

Thats the affirmation I was talking so long to make. If you have another “why” messing up with your head, I guess the explanation is easy:

Our system can even interact with other systems, what means that such systems would be taking actions in our system. Actions are “use cases”. If you miss the use case, how is that interaction supposed to happen?

The time is also an actor, because Our system may take actions periodically (automatically). Imagine an auto-sync mechanism that is tricked every 10 minutes. This is a use case, and… blah blah blah… You know the story.

When I said you were wrong, I didn’t want you to feel inferior, but I needed you to be, so that you could continue reading. At this point, You may have figured out that the post got yourself confused. Its normal. What matters is that, we apply correctly these concepts when we design a software.

There is still one question left isn’t it? What risk are we trying to reduce? The risk of delivering the wrong product, the wrong/worst solution.

Thank you for reading.