Actors and Goals

In this first episode, we use a context diagram to identify actors and goals.

A context diagram shows the system we are going to specify, surrounded by a set of actors. Actors are the people or things (other applications, hardware, etc.) that will interact with our system to get something done. Each actor has a set of goals – tasks they need to get done using the system we are specifying. These goals are the starting point of our requirements. In fact, the goals are the most concise description of all the things our system needs to do.